Class Formation Civil

Class Formation, Civil
Society and the State

A Comparative Analysis of Russia, France,
the US and England
Michael Burrage
Class Formation, Civil Society and the State
Also by Michael Burrage
REVOLUTION AND THE MAKING OF THE CONTEMPORARY LEGAL PROFESSION

IN FRANCE, THE UNITED STATES AND ENGLAND
PROFESSIONS IN THEORY AND HISTORY
Rethinking the Study of the Professions (edited with Rolf Torstendahl)
THE FORMATION OF PROFESSIONS
Knowledge, State and Strategy (edited with Rolf Torstendahl)
Class Formation, Civil
Society and the State
A Comparative Analysis of Russia, France,
the US and England
Michael Burrage
© Michael Burrage 2008
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-1-4039-4594-5
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To Pamela
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Chapter 1 An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery 1
Why no one answered Orwell 1
England in cross-national surveys 6
Questions and clues arising 14
Chapter 2 Lessons from Comparative Theories 19
Djilas’s theory of a ‘new class’ 19
Post-Marxist theories in Britain 21
Comparison via correlation coefficients in the United States 26
A bold step backwards 30
Chapter 3 What Are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves
Them? 35
Class defined 35
The two agents of class formation 36
How will we identify classes? 45
Chapter 4 Class Formation in Two Russias 49
The official classes of Imperial Russia 49
And the unofficial ones formed in civil society 63
Continuities in the management of stratification in Soviet Russia 71
Classes in the two Russias compared 81
Chapter 5 Civil Society as Adversary and Collaborator in
France 87
A proletariat that preceded industrialization 87
The social capital of the French working class 93
Adaptation of their revolutionary script in the twentieth century 99
Intellectuals appear in lieu of self-governing professionals 105
The emergence of cadres and of a lesser bourgeoisie 111
Has the Fifth Republic facilitated the formation of a ruling class? 115
A short history of a long relationship 119
Tested by a socialist U-turn and e-commerce 125
The domain of pantoufleurs 128
And their ‘control practices’ 132
Are they a mandarinate or a class? 137
vii
viii Contents
Chapter 6 Civil Society Acts Alone in the United States 141

Civil society restrains the state 141
Deprofessionalization disbands the middle class 150
Are American workers exceptional, or just different? 156
Surges of working class solidarity 164
Climax and decline 172
Searching for class distinctions in everyday life 179
Civic upper classes and aristocracies 187
Obstacles to the formation of a ruling class 191
Some reported sightings 201
Chapter 7 Interim Conclusions from Three Societies 207
Chapter 8 Re-examining the English Mystery 213
The aristocracy as prototype 213
The elites who succeeded them 217
‘Issue areas’ as a measure of elite integration 227
The middle class organizes in corporate form 231
Professionals v. entrepreneurs as class builders 240
The working class inherits and re-invests its social capital 244
When, why and how these two classes parted company 251
Manual workers establish self-regulation in their workplaces 254
Class solidarities compared 262
A powerful agency of class formation 266
What’s in a name? Laissez faire versus laissez gouverner 269
Chapter 9 Testing the Puzzle-solving Capacity of the Argument 275
Why didn’t an intelligentsia emerge in England? 275
Why were trade unions not interested in class warfare? 282
Why didn’t public ownership reduce class consciousness? 286
How could class consciousness be combined with high rates 291
of mobility?
Why did classes in England form a unique system? 294
Chapter 10 A Brief Reply to Orwell 304
Chapter 11 The Class System Comes to an End 310
The themes and finality of Thatcher’s reforms 310
The hidden injuries of classlessness 322
A final question about Orwell’s ‘wild ride into the darkness’ 338
Notes 342
Bibliography 414
Index 446
viii
Acknowledgements
This book began as a talk to a seminar during my stay at the Arbeitstelle für
Vergliechende Gesellschaftsgeshicte, the Centre for the Comparative Study of
Social History, at the Free University in Berlin. I am grateful to Jürgen Kocka,
its director, both for inviting me and persuading me to collect some initial
thoughts on this theme, and also to the continuous stream of helpful sug-
gestions and provocative questions from Hannes Siegrist while doing so.
A number of other academic sojourns abroad also helped by obliging me
to look at English society afresh, and as an outsider, in particular one at
Hosei University, Tokyo, where with the patient guidance of Hiro Muto,
along with his wife Satomi, and my students I also learned a little of Japanese
society, and another at Kyoto University. Apart from allowing me to enjoy
the best journey to work in the world – through the empty grounds of the
Imperial Palace – I there benefited from the stimulating interrogations of
Kaeshi Saeki and his graduate students.
I enjoyed Dmitri’s Verbitsky’s hospitality in Moscow and benefited from
his advice on numerous occasions, and other Moscow advocates, especially
Natasha Lobova, Gennady Sharov and Michael Rosenberg were patient
interpreters of the Russian language and Russian ways, as was my former
tutor and colleague Ernest Gellner. I also owe much to three Anglophile
comparativists at the University of California, Berkeley, Martin Trow, Nelson
Polsby and Sheldon Rothblatt for references, insights and amusing anec-
dotes. Kevin Lewis frequently gave me useful advice, as did my son Nicholas,
from the point of view of a post-class generation, and my wife Pamela who
is, of necessity, continuously engaged in cross-cultural analysis.
Michael Burrage
ix
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1
An English Obsession, Myth and
Mystery
Why no one answered Orwell
In an essay written in 1941, George Orwell observed that England was ‘the
most class-ridden country under the sun.’1 Although his remark has been
cited approvingly on numerous occasions, no one has ever attempted to
say whether the immense amount of research and debate on class con-
ducted over subsequent decades showed that he was correct when he made
it, and offered an explanation of why it should have been so, or contra-
dicted him by naming other societies that were more ‘class-ridden’.
Professional social scientists may have looked on the remark as the casual
aside of an amateur, whose thoughts on class were never particularly well-
organized or well-documented, which therefore did not warrant a reply. I
suspect, however, that there was a simpler and more telling reason why
they never responded: they couldn’t. Although the amount of research and
discussion of class accumulated rapidly, it could hardly extend to every
country ‘under the sun’. Much of it, in fact, dealt with just one class, over a
specific period, within a specific community, in one country. It was, there-
fore, unable to tell us whether England was more class-ridden than any-
where else. Some research was, to be sure, cross-national, and compared
voting behaviour, or the distributions of wealth and income, or differences
in the rates of social mobility in Britain and other societies, but such com-
parative data could not provide a summary verdict about how ‘class-ridden’
England or other societies might be, since they provided only ambiguous
and limited clues about the peculiarities of classes in the societies they
studied, and said little or nothing about their collective institutions and
consciousness. Comparative studies that touched on such matters were
extremely rare, and still are. When, in 1998, Cannadine completed his
exhaustive, copiously-documented, study of the ways the British as a whole
have perceived and interpreted their own class differences through three
centuries, he seemed to have some sympathy with Orwell’s verdict, but
could not cite a single piece of evidence to support it. He could only refer,
1
2 Class Formation, Civil Society and the State
rather lamely, to unnamed foreigners, who had, he assured us, ‘regularly

and repeatedly observed that the British are more obsessed with class than
any other nation in the world.’2
Marx encouraged the practice of trying to understand class by studying
just one society. In the belief that he had discovered the primary deter-
minant of class formation in the first capitalist society, England, he
thought it would serve as a model to understand the process in all the capi-
talist societies that followed. De te fabula narratur as he famously wrote in
the preface to the German edition of Capital – it is of you I write –, even
though my evidence is all drawn from England. Many later analysts seem
to have adopted the same strategy, though practical considerations may
perhaps have also pushed them in this direction. Comparative analysis is
immensely time-consuming and academic careers demand specialization in
a country, or a period, and often enough, in just one class. Whatever the
reason, the habit of trying to understand class dynamics with samples of
just one society continued. A sociological effort at ‘renewal’ of class ana-
lysis in Britain in 2000, for instance, brought together some of the best and
brightest in the field, who proposed a variety of remedies, but none
favoured the shock therapy of cross-societal comparison, with its ability to
crush at a stroke cherished, long-standing beliefs.3 ‘Renewal’ was to be con-
ducted in the traditional manner, with evidence from Britain alone. In the
same year, one commentator conducted a thorough review of research on
class in Britain, and concluded as if he had simultaneously been discussing
all capitalist societies, that ‘there are clearly no class actors in contemporary
capitalism.’4 How, on the basis of the evidence he examined, would he
know?
Samples of one limit what one may say about any phenomenon. A zoo-
logist who had observed only one elephant, would have a limited know-
ledge of elephants. The next one he encountered might be pink. And we
might reasonably doubt the expertise of a psychiatrist who had only ever
examined one patient, no matter how intensively, or of a political scientist
who had studied the political institutions of just one country, even if he
had devoted a lifetime to the task. One may have similar doubts about stu-
dents of class who have only studied one society. McKibbin’s investigation
of the way class permeated almost every aspect of the lives of the English
people over the years 1918 to 1951, illustrates the point rather well, pre-
cisely because it was so comprehensive, and so superbly conducted.5 He is a
Canaletto of English classes, and provided an enormous amount of ammu-
nition that seemed entirely consistent with Orwell’s observation. In the
end, however, he could not be said either to support or refute it, since he
had no evidence from anywhere else. And whilst he could record numerous
changes during his chosen period, the dynamics of England’s class sub-
cultures remained somewhat mysterious. It was not clear why English
people remained attached and enclosed in them over his chosen period, or
An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery 3
when and why, for that matter, they might dissolve and disappear, as many
observers claimed they were doing when his book appeared in 1998. The
three main classes, into which he thought the English were divided over
those decades, had not come from anywhere, and were not apparently
going anywhere. They were simply there.
March, Sproull and Tamuz wrote a clever piece called ‘Learning from
Samples of One or Fewer’, but they were endeavouring to show that all
was not lost, that organizations might make the most of limited and infre-
quent data, not recommending a preferred research strategy.6 Folk wisdom,
which Rudyard Kipling neatly paraphrased, offers a rather better method-
ological rule: ‘little he knows England, who only England knows’. At times,
this may seem a rather tough, and even unreasonable, requirement. After
reading McKibbin, one would hardly wish to conclude ‘little he knows
England’, but then it is not at all certain that he ‘only England knows’. On
the contrary, hints are scattered throughout his work that his acute obser-
vation of English preferences and distinctions has been sharpened by com-
parisons with other countries, which surface in frequent remarks like
‘Visitors to England were always astonished …’ or in references to ‘a strange
habit which strikes nearly all visitors to England’, and ‘taboos which con-
stantly surprised and bemused visitors to England.’ He was himself, as it
happens, one of the bemused visitors. He is Australian. His comparisons
with Australia and everywhere else were, however, not for publication, no
doubt because he felt that they did not have quite the same scholarly status
as the evidence about England which he had so painstakingly collected. It
likewise seems difficult to imagine that those engaged in the ‘renewal of
class’ project mentioned above were not making comparisons as they pro-
ceeded. Some of them did in fact occasionally glance over their shoulders
at other societies, and since they were not all English, it is a fair bet that
they made frequent cross-cultural comparisons during their coffee-breaks.
Implicit, occasional, coffee-break comparisons do not, however, quite
satisfy the folk rule, which requires explicit comparative evidence which a
reader can evaluate.
At first sight, it might seem that an easy way round this rule is open to
any diligent student, simply by reading studies of class formation in
England alongside similar studies from another society, noting the differ-
ences, and then drawing conclusions about how and why they differ. In so
doing, one might benefit from the detail that intensive single-country
studies provide, and at the same time obtain the advantages of comparison.
Such do-it-yourself comparisons are, however, by no means easy. To begin
with, it is difficult to find studies that can be read side-by-side and readily
compared with one another. If, for example, one looks for a historical
ethnography of France comparable to that of McKibbin, one finds that the
many celebrated class theorists from that country have provided rather
little comparable evidence about the way in which classes have actually
shaped the life and leisure, and everyday behaviour and relationships of
French people over time. One turns in hope to Zeldin’s dazzling multi-
volume montage, which is by far the most comprehensive analysis of
the normal everyday behaviour of the French of all classes, from the mid-
nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and therefore includes the period
covered by McKibbin. His titles give fair warning, however, that class has
not emerged as one of his major organizing themes. They refer to personal
qualities, like ambition, love, taste and anxiety, rather than to class. His
introduction is also sceptical as to ‘whether the animosities between social
classes were as total as they sometimes appeared.’7 Nonetheless, since he
is a scrupulous, perceptive, and seemingly indefatigable researcher, we
might reasonably expect him to show how class had shaped or intersected
personal virtues and vices of the French, if such had been the case.
When he turned, however, to examine, one by one, the classes which are
commonly supposed to have defined and divided French society, almost all
of them fragmented in the light of his copious evidence. Thus, having
minutely documented the diversity within and between many bourgeois
occupations, he decided that the evidence ‘does not support the view of
this class as unified, coherent or class conscious. The internal conflicts and
contradictory interests within it appear as a major characteristic of it.’
Having similarly reviewed the evidence about the lives of peasants, he
asked whether their declining economic condition and social status over
his chosen period had produced ‘a sense of class unity or class conscious-
ness’ among them. ‘The answer’, he declared, ‘seems to be definitely that it
did not.’ Having gone on to document the wide differences in organization
and income of French workers, he concluded that ‘it is impossible to talk
about the proletariat as a homogeneous class, because it was changing all
the time and because the variations within it were very considerable.’
Indeed, he thought that the ‘internal divisions among the working class
were even more profound than those among their employers.’8
In the end, he found only two enduring class or near-class formations in
France over his entire chosen period: civil servants and intellectuals.
Despite their hierarchical stratification, Zeldin thought civil servants
‘almost formed a hereditary class, with considerable cohesion of outlook
and values.’9 The other enduring class formation, that of intellectuals, had
been anticipated at the very beginning of his study, when he declared that
he hoped to ‘assess the place that intelligence, or reason, or ideas have in
French life, (and) to explain how intellectuals came to be held in such
exceptionally high esteem.’ At the end, of his first volume, they remain his
heroes because of the ‘crucial role they played both in subduing disunity
and in attacking traditionalism’. Perhaps, he reflected at one point, ‘one
ought to talk not of the domination of France by the bourgeoisie, nor even
by money, but of the unacknowledged rule of the intellectuals.’10 The
chance of making a comparison with these two classes in England seem
slim. McKibbin seldom referred to civil servants, and then not as a class.
Intellectuals as a collectivity or class are never mentioned.
If we next turn to the United States, there appear to be possibilities of
comparing Fussell’s account of classes there, published in 1983 with
Cooper’s account of class in England, published two years earlier, which
had insisted that class was ‘alive and well and living in people’s minds’,
and ‘pervaded everything in England, gardens, food, drink, health, the arts,
sports, sex, religion and death, everything.’11 The possibility of comparing
them seems to have occurred to DeMott, but he went on to observe differ-
ences that made it difficult to do so.12 Cooper’s account of class in England
is, he pointed out, from within, while Fussell’s is that of an angry outsider
who has nothing but contempt for class-oriented attitudes and behaviour
of many of his fellow Americans. Cooper therefore begins her book with
‘an extended account of her own social location within the middle class’,
and as she proceeds it is clear that she sees herself as ‘entangled at each
moment in social coils from which extrication is finally perceived as nei-
ther conceivable nor desirable.’ Fussell, by contrast, only wants to identify
the ‘status obsessions … self-deceptions and vanities’ of other Americans.
For Cooper, ‘class-based responses seem as natural … as breathing and
eating: one is, she assumes, one’s class’, whereas Fussell ‘strongly implies
that he himself is classless, that class is an option not a fate, (an option
taken up by fools, a baleful influence from which escape is blessedly poss-
ible) and that intelligent people can break free from the constraints and
anxieties of the whole class racket.’ If pursued, therefore, this particular
comparison would, in the end, turn out to be a rather lop-sided one between
a humorous account of the behaviour, manners and speech of each of
England’s classes, and of their enduring, institutionalized relationships with a
stern critique of the status-stratified consumption patterns of Americans,
drawing heavily on market research.
Authors of studies of class in one country feel, as all these studies show,
under no obligation to proceed with the same priorities and organizing
concepts, or to gather the same types of evidence as authors in another,
and opportunities for do-it-yourself comparisons are therefore rare.
Comparison is evidently a separate intellectual exercise. It requires an ana-
lytical or theoretical framework of some sort that will transcend, but not
distort or obliterate the peculiarities of classes in the countries being com-
pared, and will also allow us to organize and interrogate the available his-
torical and sociological evidence about each of them, so that we may
identify, and try to explain, their similarities and differences.
As cross-national evidence on various kinds of class-related topics began
to appear in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, some efforts were made to construct
comparative theories in this manner. It follows that if we hope to make a
coherent and informed reply to Orwell, we have two preliminary tasks. The
first is to consider the cross-national data mentioned above, ambiguous
and incomplete as it may be, to see if it provides any clues about the pecu-
liarities of English classes. None of it refers to Orwell’s claim, but it may
nonetheless be of interest to see how well his claim stands up against
this evidence. The second is to see whether the theoretical efforts over the
third quarter of the twentieth century provide a strategy or concepts or an
analytical framework that might help us to conduct comparisons making
use of the considerable volume of subsequent historical and sociological
evidence about classes in individual societies.
England in cross-national surveys
There are five main kinds of cross-national evidence, though one must first
note that in some of it England appears alongside Wales, in some as part of
Great Britain, and in some as part of the United Kingdom. This is a dif-
ficulty which bedevils any attempt to study English society; there seems no
simple way round it, short of ditching and re-analysing all the British or
U.K. data, which is a task I cannot undertake. Currently, just short of 84%
of the population of the United Kingdom resides in England, while the
evidence I use sometimes includes the nearly 9% who live in Scotland, the
5% in Wales, and the 3% in Northern Ireland, proportions which have
changed over time, though not massively.13 Given that these non-English
populations have been subject to the same national government as the
English over a long period, that they share many of the same institutions,
and that there have been extensive ties and extensive mobility between
these countries over many generations, one may reasonably assume their
classes also have many common characteristics. However, observable differ-
ences in the religious, educational and political behaviour of these other
British nations also suggest that it would be unwise to assume that their
classes and class relationships have been, or are, identical, and I do not do
so. I therefore use evidence from Great Britain and the United Kingdom to
analyse England, only because it is unavoidable, and in the belief that it
will not lead to fatal errors or distortions.
Of the five kinds of cross-national evidence available, voting behaviour
deserves first consideration since it may provide a reasonably direct and
unambiguous indicator of class loyalty and solidarity. Alford was the first to
devise a cross-national measure of voting behaviour, and used it to
compare the British electorate with three other English-speaking democra-
cies, Australia, Canada and the United States over the years 1936–1962.14 It
showed, without much doubt, that British voters over this period were con-
sistently more inclined than voters in the other three to vote on class lines.
His findings were corroborated by a number of later studies. In an analysis
based on four American election-year surveys between 1966 and 1972, and
four British surveys between 1963 and 1970, Vanneman found ‘striking dif-
ferences’ in the extent to which the manual/non-manual distinction cor-
responded with voting differences. It was ‘four times more important for
party affiliation in Britain than in the United States.’ Moreover, subjective
class self-placement ‘was the most important determinant of party affiliation
in Britain’, whereas in the United States, Vanneman added, ‘it is difficult to
show that the same class-identification variable has any effect at all.’
Britons, he concluded, ‘affiliate with political parties and vote in a far more
“class conscious” manner than Americans.’15 In their three-country com-
parison, Weakliem and Heath went back to 1936 and found ‘class voting is
strongest in Britain, somewhat weaker in France, and considerably weaker
in the United States.’16 However, before awarding Orwell one point, we
must add that when comparisons were later extended to other continental
European societies, Scandinavian electorates were found to be as class
polarized as the British, and perhaps more so.17 Moreover, Weakliem and
Heath also showed that while class polarized voting in Britain had increased
over the years until 1936 to 1951, it thereafter declined, most dramatically
in 1979, the year of Mrs Thatcher’s first election victory, when the chances
of a non-manual worker voting Conservative, and a manual worker voting
Labour, the basis of Alford’s original measure, dropped sharply.18
Voting is, of course, a rather limited item of behavioural evidence to
judge how ‘class-ridden’ a society may have been, in the strict sense
perhaps not behavioural at all, since it measures only reported voting, or
voting intentions, but there are in any event no other simple cross-national
behavioural measures. Responses to pollsters’ questions about class are a
second source of comparative evidence. These cannot take us very far back
in time, and they encounter their own distinctive methodological hazards.
A survey by Gallup in 1979 illustrated one of them. It asked respondents in
13 countries: ‘If people in society can be divided into the five classes shown
on this card, which class would you say you fall under?’ On the face of
things, the responses seemed to show that the British were indeed distinc-
tive, since they were between five and ten times more likely than all the
other nationalities to choose the lowest class offered, which in their case
was ‘working class’, to which 43% assigned themselves. However, for some
unexplained reason, the other countries were offered ‘low class’ or its
equivalent, rather than ‘working class’, a flaw in the questionnaire design,
and understandably perhaps, only 5% or less of respondents in the other
12 countries said they belonged to it. So we will never know whether the
distinctiveness of the British at that time was real, or simply due to a
momentary slip by Gallup’s staff.19 Non-random surveys of foreign opinion
have occasionally offered some support for the view that foreigners have
seen the British as especially class conscious, but the methodologies of such
studies do not enable one to draw any confident conclusions from them.20
Cross-societal attitude surveys without obvious methodological flaws, are
rare, recent, and refer to fewer countries, usually only to the Britain and the
United States. They offer occasional, but rather uncertain, support for the
claim that the British have been peculiarly conscious of class. In his com-
parison of the American National Opinion Research Center’s General Social
Survey and the British Social Attitudes Survey of 1986, for example, Davis
reported that though British and American respondents did not differ
much in their overall perceptions of the degree of inequality in their soci-
eties, the British were much more likely to classify themselves as working
class, despite the fact that the distribution of occupations in the two coun-
tries was about the same.21 The British were also more likely to think that
‘what you achieve in life depends on your family background’, from which
one might infer, I suppose, that they were more inclined than Americans to
think that their life chances were class-determined. They also favoured
welfare and redistributive government policies to reduce inequalities to a
much greater extent than Americans, and this might also, perhaps, be seen
as a corollary of their view that inequalities are the result of individuals’
class origins rather than their own merits and effort.
Seven years later, in 1993, Evans was able to compare national samples in
Britain and the United States alongside those from five other countries. In
this wider comparative context, however, it was the United States, not
Britain, which emerged as exceptional. For instance, the association
between objective class position as determined by occupation and sub-
jective self-identification was not very close in any of the seven countries,
but in Britain it was less close than in Austria, West Germany and the
Netherlands, suggesting that respondents in those three countries had, at
this time, a clearer perception of class than the British, or at any rate a per-
ception that more closely corresponded to the occupational categories that
sociologists use to distinguish classes. The association was least close in the
United States, prompting Evans to suggest that ‘Class divisions appear to be
rather more blurred to Americans than to other nationalities.’22
British respondents in this 1993 survey were the least likely to believe
that they had ‘a good chance of improving their standard of living’, and
gave the most class-divided responses to this question. American respon-
dents, by contrast, gave the highest proportion of affirmative responses,
indeed were nearly unanimous, with only marginal class differences.
Respondents’ answers to multiple questions intended to determine whether
they saw ‘getting ahead in life’ as a product of class advantages or of per-
sonal attributes and merits did not show the British to be especially inclined
at this time to emphasize class advantages and disadvantages by com-
parison with other European societies. Britain stood out from the six other
countries in only one respect: support for policies to reduce class-related
inequalities differed more sharply by class than elsewhere. In this respect,
Davis concluded, Britain was an ‘exceptionally class-divided society.’23
In the end, the evidence persuaded him that, in 1993 at least, ‘received
wisdom has some basis in reality. The United States is indeed a relatively
classless society.’ However, the received wisdom ‘does rather less well’, he
thought, ‘in the case of Britain. Britain is not after all as class-bound as it is
often painted, though it is among the class-bound in most respects.’24
Clearly, there is still much to understand about instant answers to
doorstep interviewers and their relationship to actual behaviour. This rela-
tionship is sometimes puzzling, to put it mildly. In one 1991 survey for
instance, two-thirds of a random sample of the population in Britain replied
negatively to the question: ‘Do you ever think of yourself as belonging to a
class?’ However, when the interviewer pressed on regardless, and asked
interviewees to what class they would assign themselves, almost the same
proportion assigned themselves to the working class. This, Adonis and Pollard
noted, represented an increase of more than 20% over the 43% who assigned
themselves to the working class in one of the earliest such polls in 1943.25
Since the working class as formally defined by sociologists had sharply
declined over these years, one must wonder what, if anything, we should
infer from these replies. Still more baffling was the trend in the responses
to the question: ‘There used to be a lot of talk in politics about class strug-
gle. Do you think there is a class struggle in this country or not?’ And in
the 18 times that Gallup asked this question since 1961 the proportion
steadily rose until in 1996, when about 80% replied in the affirmative.26
Unfortunately, the interviewers were not told to ask the respondents what
they meant by class struggle, or how they themselves and their neighbours
engaged in it. Opinion surveys, one must conclude, provide limited and
rather uncertain evidence on which to judge Orwell’s claim. Bits of them
might be cited either way, though as the 1979 Gallup survey showed,
responses might hinge on a single ill-chosen word.
A third kind of comparative evidence is that provided by comparative
studies of social mobility. Since these measure the chances of those from
less advantaged backgrounds to enter occupations of higher status, and
probably therefore to earn higher incomes and own property, they might
conceivably offer some evidence to enable us to evaluate Orwell’s claim, for
if social mobility in Britain was peculiarly restricted compared to that of
other societies, then we might infer that class barriers were working more
effectively than in other countries, and that the British therefore had
reason to be more concerned with class.
In the event, none of the mobility evidence supports this line of argu-
ment. We may begin with sectoral rather than national studies, and speci-
fically with higher education, which is a major avenue of social mobility,
and is thought to determine to a significant extent, subsequent career oppor-
tunities. In his historical cross-European comparison of access to higher
education in 1985, Müller found that over the previous three decades
England’s higher education had been ‘among the less socially selective.’
Countries were, he found, ‘spread along a considerable range, the extremes
of which are represented by France and England. In France more than 55%
of graduates have grown up in one of the two service classes, and in
England only 35%.’27 To anyone familiar with the sociology of education

in England, where every step has been analysed as a class obstacle, this is a
somewhat disconcerting finding. Despite these obstacles, according to this
study, English higher education was actually the most open in Europe.
Studies of mobility at the workplace offer further support for the view
that England and Britain have been distinctively open and mobile. In 1972,
Granick conducted the most thorough comparison of managerial selection
and careers to date, which was based on the re-analysis of dozens of earlier
studies from France, the United States, Russia and Britain. He concluded
that British industry was peculiarly ‘egalitarian’ in two senses: first, a larger
proportion of British managers were recruited from the shopfloor than in
any of the other three industrial societies, and second, manager/worker
income differentials in Britain were smaller than in France, the United
States, and possibly even the Soviet Union.28 In 1974, Mannari provided
further support for this view of British egalitarianism in the workplace,
though he did not label it as such, by documenting striking differences in
opportunities for mobility between Japanese and British industry. While
less than 1% of managers in his Japanese sample had come from manual
worker homes, more than 16% of British managers had done so.29 In 1986,
Ishida assembled comparative evidence from the United States, Japan and
Britain and came to a similar conclusion. Current occupational status was,
he found, less likely to be determined by the first job of the respondents in
Britain, and more managers were recruited from unskilled manual worker
origins in Britain than in either Japan or the United States. Britain was
therefore, as Granick had suggested, distinctively egalitarian.30 In 1997,
Cassis provided still further corroboration for this conclusion in his study
of the family background of the CEOs of very large French and British com-
panies over most of the twentieth century. Whereas 16% of the fathers of
British CEOs in 1953 were manual workers, only 4% of the French were,
and in 1989, the proportions had risen to 39% of the British CEOs and to
just 9% of the French.31 Over the twentieth century, therefore, the CEOs of
very large British firms were consistently about four times more likely than
their French counterparts to be the sons of manual workers.
Some society-wide comparisons of mobility rates pointed in the same
direction as these sectoral studies, though the pioneering study of this
kind, by Bendix and Lipset in 1956, poured cold water on the idea that
Britain was in any way unlike other industrial societies. They found that
the rate of mobility between manual and non-manual occupations was
roughly the same in the five societies they analysed and concluded that the
rate of social mobility was simply an integral and continuing aspect of
industrialization.32 However, a subsequent cross-national comparison by
Fox and Miller differentiated classes more precisely and found that Britain
was, in the back-handed way they chose to put it, ‘less congealed in some
respects’ than either the United States and Japan. They argued that
‘Downward mobility may be more indicative of social fluidity than upward

mobility’, and found that ‘Great Britain has the most downward movement
and is second (to the United States) in upward mobility.’33 Their evidence
therefore suggested that Britain was the most egalitarian of their four
societies.
In 1992, Erickson and Goldthorpe compared mobility rates in nine
societies. They reported a ‘constant flux’ around a ‘core pattern of fluidity’,
and were reluctant to distinguish, in any significant way, one of their
societies from any other. They seemed, in fact, to enjoy stamping on
various national stereotypes, including the view that England’s class struc-
ture was peculiarly ‘sclerotic’, as they put it. Nonetheless, some interesting
cross-national variations can be discerned amidst the ‘constant flux’. Their
data showed, for instance, that mobility during working lives was higher
in England than in France, and also higher than in two then-socialist
societies, Hungary and Poland. In total vertical mobility, England came
second to Sweden, and was followed by Scotland, while Scotland and England
were highest in downward mobility, ahead of Germany, Sweden, France and
the Netherlands.34 Overall, therefore, cross-national mobility research does
not seem to offer any support for Orwell’s claim.
A fourth kind of comparative evidence refers to the inequalities in the
distribution of wealth, which might reasonably be thought to throw some
light on class formation, since inequalities of wealth have often been
thought to be the bedrock of class identification. This data goes back
further than any other. Lindert, for example, analysed samples of probates
since the early nineteenth century, and showed that there had been a
marked surge in inequality of property and wealth in England and Wales
from 1810 to 1875, by which date 1% of the adult population owned 61%
of all property.35 ‘Victorian England and Wales’, he decided, ‘was as
unequal as any in the North Atlantic community … Among the advanced
countries of the nineteenth century Britain led the way, so to speak, with
wide pre-industrial income gaps that grew even wider during the Industrial
Revolution and the lifetime of Marx.’36 If, therefore, inequalities of wealth
encourage class identification and class formation, then the English at the
time had every reason to form classes and think of themselves in terms of
class.
The year 1875 seems, however, to have been the high point of inequality
of property ownership in Britain. It thereafter steadily declined. Rubinstein,
who compared the trends in property ownership in Britain and the United
States over the greater part of the twentieth century, observed that from
the First World War, ‘the picture for Britain is one of a continuing trend to
greater equality’, though by the middle of the twentieth century, property
ownership was still less equally distributed than in the United States.
Lampman concurred. By his calculations, in 1946–1947 the top 1.5% of
adults owned 53% of the total wealth in England and Wales, but only 27%
of total wealth in the United States.37 Rubinstein was able, however, to con-
tinue the comparison, and he found that Britain continued to evolve
‘toward greater equality in a much more consistent and striking way than
… America’. After the third quarter of the twentieth century, the degree of
inequality of property ownership in the two countries was about the same,
so that ‘the richest 1% of the population in Britain owned at most mar-
ginally more in 1981 – and on some measurements rather less – than did
the richest 1% of Americans in 1972.’38
In 1995, Woolf continued the analysis still further. After confirming
Rubinstein’s argument that there had been a dramatic decline in the indi-
vidual inequality of wealth in Britain over the 50 years 1923–1974, he
noted that the share of the top percentile of the population fell from 59%
in 1923 to 20% in 1974. By 1990, he calculated that Sweden was three per-
centage points and the United States about 18 percentage points above the
U.K., which meant that the top percentile in the U.S. owned proportion-
ately twice as much as their U.K. counterparts.39 Shorrocks’ re-examination
of various sources confirmed ‘a substantial downward trend in wealth con-
centration’ in England and Wales over the years from 1923 to 1980.40
All of this evidence, however, significantly understates the redistribution
of property ownership in Britain over the course of the twentieth century,
and therefore the contrast with the United States, since Britain experienced
dramatic redistributions for which there was no American equivalent,
namely the transfer of ‘the means of production’, of manufacturing, of ser-
vices and of housing, from private to public ownership. After being taken
under public control, these things no longer appeared in property owner-
ship or estate data like those cited, though we can get some rough idea of
their scale by the figures for 1955, when some 11% of the manufacturing
labour force worked in the public sector, which was also responsible for
some 55% of gross capital formation. If we add service sector public enter-
prises, such as health care, universities and broadcasting (private broad-
casting only began in Britain in 1955), then we would have to include a
significant slice of the labour force, probably about 25%.41 This still does
not quite exhaust the transfer of property to the public sector in Britain,
since in the inter-war period and in the immediate post-war years, publicly-
owned housing increased in Britain much more rapidly than private housing,
and then constituted about a third of the total housing stock, whereas in
the United States, at its highest point, in 1958, it never amounted to as
much as 3%, and then shrank to under 1%.42
A great deal of evidence therefore indicates that over the first three-
quarters of the twentieth century, there was a consistent trend to greater
equality in the distribution of private property ownership in Britain. It
came to an abrupt end, however, in the 1980s. Woolf found that in that
decade the trend was ‘almost flat’, though he showed that this brought
Britain no closer to the United States and Sweden since in both countries
inequalities continued to increase. In the same decade, the displacement of

private by public property was also reversed, as the Thatcher governments
privatized the nationalized ‘means of production’, and sold council houses
to their tenants.
The fifth kind of comparative evidence, about the distribution of income
in Britain, follows roughly the same course as that of the distribution of
property, namely, extreme inequality until the third quarter of the nine-
teenth century, followed by an unbroken trend towards greater equality
over more than a century, and a sharp reversal and increase in inequality at
the end of the twentieth. Williamson conducted the most thorough study
of the early sources of evidence about income distribution, and concluded
that in England and Wales ‘there was a rise in inequality across the century
following 1760.’ However, ‘a corner was turned soon after 1867’, and there-
after, ‘to World War I, an egalitarian levelling is unambiguous, pronounced
and pervasive across the full income distribution. The bottom 40% increased
their share of late Victorian income, while the top five and ten per cent
suffered a very sharp erosion.’43
Williamson was trying to demonstrate the existence of the so-called
Kuznets’ ‘curve’, which suggested that inequality always increases in the
early stages of industrialization but declines thereafter, and was not inter-
ested in identifying differences between industrializing societies. However,
those who have done so agree that by the mid-twentieth century Britain
was amongst the more egalitarian in terms of income distribution. In the
fifties, for instance, Lydall and Lansing found a more equal distribution of
income in Britain than in the United States.44 Reviewing a more diverse
range of comparative measures, Watanabe decided that ‘Japan and the
United States appear to have had similar patterns of income inequality to
those found in France, and all three countries showed a much greater
degree of concentration of income than could be found in either Australia
or Britain.’45 Atkinson’s six-country comparison of percentile shares of
income in the 1960s and 1970s found that while the top 20% of income
earners received least, and the bottom 20% most, in Australia (38.9% and
6.3% respectively), Britain was not far behind on both measures (39.4%
and 5.7%), and that some distance separated both Australia and Britain
from the other four countries in the study: Eire (44.5% and 4.1%), Japan
(46.2% and 3.8%), the United States (46.4% and 3.8%) and France (47.0%
and 4.3%).46
Other scholars have come to a similar conclusion. Rubinstein’s data on
income distribution from the 1950s to the early 1980s showed that by the
end of this period there was in the U.S. ‘a somewhat greater level of income
inequality than in Britain’.47 Plotting trends since World War II, Brandolini
and Rossi, found that pre-tax income inequalities placed Britain in roughly
the same category as the United States in the 1950s, but the two countries
then diverged as Britain joined the ‘highly egalitarian’ countries in post-tax
income, like Australia and Scandinavia, which they distinguished from

the ‘inegalitarian’ ones, like the U.S., France, Germany, and Italy. How-
ever, just as the studies of property ownership noted a U-turn in the 1980s,
Brandolini and Rossi also noted a rise of income inequality in the mid-80s,
which included Britain along with other industrial societies.48 Working
with a different set of countries, Fritzell, however, found that, though the
increasing inequality was found in other European societies, Britain experi-
enced the ‘largest and most sustained’ increase in inequality of them all.’49
Questions and clues arising
This review of some of the cross-national evidence apparently relevant to

class collected over the past 50 years has therefore proved rather inconclu-
sive, as we suspected it would. It is not at all clear whether it might be said
to either confirm or reject Orwell’s claim.
The massive inequalities in the distribution of wealth and incomes up to
1875 might be said to have given the English a head start in feeling class-
ridden, and the studies of voting behaviour in the mid-twentieth century,
which showed that the English voted in a more class polarized manner
than other English-speaking democracies, as well as France and Southern
Europe, offer him a little support. As it happened, they were most inclined
to do so in the election of 1950, a few years after Orwell made his remark.50
Some later opinion polls of class attitudes and self-identification might,
with some qualifications, also be quoted on his behalf. Most of the com-
parative evidence, however, seems to be against him. Throughout his life,
wealth and income were becoming progressively more equally distributed
in Britain, and simultaneously being squeezed or displaced by the rapid
growth of public property. Moreover, many studies of social mobility sug-
gested that Britain was more open and mobile than most other societies,
especially in the workplace, often supposed to be the engine-room of the
entire class system, which makes it difficult to see how or why England
should be more class-ridden than anywhere else.
How, one wonders, would Orwell have responded to such evidence?
Since he was not very consistent on the subject, there are a number of poss-
ibilities. He might simply have cited later knowledgeable observers of English
society to support his view, but they would take us no further forward,
since none provide any more comparative evidence than he did.51 Or he
might perhaps have observed that even after the century-long trend of
‘equalization’ and ‘leveling’, more than sufficient inequalities of wealth and
income, and more than sufficient barriers to upward mobility, remained to
generate perceptions of class difference and provoke class consciousness,
and perhaps antagonism. Such a reasonable reply, however, still does not
answer the question why England should be more class-ridden than other
less egalitarian, and less mobile, societies. Perhaps he might have met the
evidence head-on, or simply dismissed it, on the grounds that there is

no direct relationship between inequalities of wealth and income, or
blocked opportunities for social mobility, and class institutions and class
consciousness.
Some of his comments on class seem to preclude this kind of answer,
since they suggest that he thought that class was a product of economic
inequalities. He once observed, for instance, that ‘a person who has grown
up in council housing estate is likely to be – indeed, visibly is – more
middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum’. He
also noticed that ‘while in 1910 every human being in these islands could
be placed in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent. That is no
longer the case.’ In the ‘new townships’ of the South East, he observed
‘wide gradations of income’, but added that, ‘it is the same kind of life that
is being lived at different levels, so that after 1918 there has begun to appear
something that had never existed in England before: people of indeter-
minate social class’.52
His more considered reflections on class, however, show that he thought
of it as rather more than a result of one’s standard of living or a response to
perceived inequalities of wealth, income or opportunity, and as something
learned, deeply absorbed and collectively maintained, and a permanent
part of English identity and culture. When, for instance, he reflected on his
own class position in The Road to Wigan Pier he observed that ‘nearly every-
thing that I think and do is a result of class distinctions. All my notions of
good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly
and beautiful – are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and
food and clothes, my sense of honor, my table manners, my turns of
speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body are the
products of a special kind of upbringing, and a special niche about halfway
up the social hierarchy.’ He therefore thought that it was almost impossible
for him to have real contact with ‘a proletarian’ since ‘I would have to sup-
press not merely my private snobbishness, but most of my other tastes as
well. I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should
hardly be recognizable as the same person.’53 Hence his final answer would,
I imagine, be that this cross-national evidence we have reviewed does not
get to the heart of the matter. ‘Go away!’, I imagine him saying, ‘Get some
evidence that allows us to compare the way class enters the lives of people,
affects their notions of good and evil, their tastes, manners, accents, loyal-
ties and their sense of honour. We will then decide whether or not any
other society has been more class-ridden than the English.’
Answered in this manner, we might well feel our review of cross-national
evidence has been entirely wasted, but this is not quite the case. While it
might not have reached any firm conclusion, it has at least suggested where
we should not look, for if an ‘unambiguous, pronounced and pervasive’
century-long process of ‘egalitarian leveling’ and higher rates of mobility
than other societies had no significant impact on class affiliations and sen-
timents of the English, or at least none that McKibbin and other assiduous
students could readily identify, then it seems unlikely that an explanation
of the persistence of classes in England is to be found in such phenomena.
Economic inequality, though often taken to be synonymous with class,
evidently has a rather uncertain relationship to it, and perhaps no relation-
ship at all. To understand the formation and persistence of classes in
England or anywhere else, and their distinctive manners, tastes and senses
of honour, this evidence suggests that we would be best advised to look
elsewhere, at actions, events and agents that helped to form and maintain
classes, at collective associations which have defined and articulated class
interests, at institutions which have reproduced and sustained class manners
and cultures. It suggests, in short, that we would be better advised to
examine the politics of class formation rather than the economics.
If Animal Farm and 1984 are taken as Orwell’s definitive view of class
formation, there can be little doubt that he would strongly support this
suggestion. And the sudden reversal, during the 1980s and 1990s, of the
century-long equalization of wealth and income in Britain, which may well
have been accompanied by some ‘flattening’ or even decline in the rate of
social mobility offers it further support.54 If classes had all along depended
on material conditions and ‘life chances’, class should then have become
more important in the lives of the English people, instead of which exactly
the opposite appears to have been the case. Class-polarized voting declined,
and along with it public and sociological discussions of class, prompting
many informed observers to speak of the demise or death of class.55 Classes
are, it seems, altogether more curious and puzzling phenomena than research
measuring the various inequalities of wealth and opportunity might lead us
to believe. They must, therefore, be approached in a quizzical, interrogatory
spirit, rather than simply documented and deplored.
Lord Bauer, a Hungarian-born economist, was one of those who approached
them in just this spirit. In a pamphlet first published in 1978, he declared
that the British were ‘obsessed’ with class, but what was puzzling about this
for him was that they had little reason to be.56 He admitted that they had
always enjoyed ‘fine and small’ social distinctions, but Britain had, he
thought, been a particularly open and mobile society through most of its
history, and the British had never enforced rigid class distinctions as many
other countries had done, and certainly had ‘not been governed by a rich
ruling caste.’ He cited Disraeli, son of a Jewish immigrant, Lloyd George, an
orphan, Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a fisherwoman, as past
prime ministers who came from lowly family circumstances, and alongside
recent ones, such as Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher and Major, all of
whose ‘backgrounds are not exactly upper class’. He also mentioned a
number of notable recent cabinet ministers of both parties who went to
state schools, and whose fathers were in modest circumstances. He gave
various examples to show that British industry ‘is managed and has been
managed for decades or even centuries by new men, people who have
made their own way, often from humble beginnings’, adding that ‘only
31% of the 500 richest people (in Britain today) inherited their wealth.’ He
then gave more examples of top civil servants, senior military officers and
distinguished academics, who had risen from poor family backgrounds,
and even one Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘These are not’, he insisted,
‘isolated examples. They can be multiplied indefinitely.’57
How then, he wondered, had the British acquired such a strangely mis-
taken view of themselves? In his view, ‘intellectuals and politicians, jour-
nalists and academics’, especially intellectuals, were largely to blame,
‘because they are inclined to compare British society with American society
(which on the surface at any rate is more open than British society)’, rather
than with ‘continental European societies, which they know less well’, and
‘where class distinctions are clearer and firmer.’ He also thought that ‘the
long and relatively peaceful continuity of British history’ conveyed an
impression of ‘a stable social system and impregnable and static ruling
class’, adding that the ‘open and mobile character of British society’ may
itself ‘have enhanced the preoccupation with class, since it made the aris-
tocracy and prosperous groups accessible and conspicuous, and thus more
envied and resented than elsewhere.’ Bauer then urged the British to be rid
of their obsession. They had, in his view, been punishing themselves with
it for far too long, and it had besides prompted them to embark on a
number of unwise public policies in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the
nationalization of industries, council housing and heavy and steeply pro-
gressive taxation. It had also made them tolerate numerous ‘trade union
privileges and restrictions.’ Paradoxically, these policies had, he thought,
made Britain in the 1970s rather less open and mobile than it had pre-
viously been, ‘both directly, and by making it more difficult to start new
businesses, indirectly.’58
Ringen, who enthusiastically endorsed Bauer’s argument when it was
reprinted in 1998, described the belief in a rigid class structure as ‘the great
British myth.’59 He was aware that myth is a social phenomenon that itself
requires explanation, though he provided none, other than to point to
the mistaken research methodologies and misleading assumptions, which
sociologists in Britain had come to accept over the past few decades, and
which had led them to conclude incorrectly that there has been no change
in the class structure. These misleading methodologies and assumptions
could, however, only have influenced other sociologists and their students,
and perhaps historians, but they could hardly have generated a national
‘myth’, which a great many others who have no time for sociological
methodologies accepted, just as Orwell did. If it is a myth, then it certainly
deserves close attention since it has continued for rather a long time and
acquired a certain stature, even grandeur. It is to myths what the Great
Wall of China is to bricklaying, or the Sphinx of Cheops to sandcastles.

Like the Sphinx, it seems to be hiding a deep secret, in its case about
the peculiar character of English institutions, and the distinctive way the
English have chosen to interpret themselves and relate to each other.
Calling class an obsession, or a myth, does not therefore bring the mind to
rest. Its mystery remains. The rest of this study is an attempt to solve it.
If we hope to do this, we have already decided that we must first under-
stand how classes have been formed or dissolved, succeeded or failed, in
other societies. And if we are to do that, we have also already decided, we
need a set of concepts, or an analytical framework of some kind that enables
us to compare the evidence about classes in one society with that from
another. We may therefore now turn to our second preliminary task, and
consider the efforts to construct theories of class mentioned above, and see
if they provide any guidance about how we might best proceed.
2
Lessons from Comparative Theories
Djilas’s theory of a ‘new class’
The first theoretical contribution which deserves attention is that of

Milovan Djilas, who in many respects was Orwell’s soul-mate. While Orwell
wrote allegories of Soviet life, Djilas observed it first-hand, by personal
contact with Stalin and other Soviet leaders, and as a member of the polit-
ical elite of a sister socialist regime, his native Yugoslavia. They came to the
same conclusion about Soviet Russia. In his essay The New Class, first pub-
lished in 1956, Djilas turned Marx’s central proposition that a ruling class
derived from property ownership on its head, and argued that the political
elite of the Soviet Union and other socialist societies had used their polit-
ical power to control and enjoy property without being its legal owners, and
thereby created a new ruling class.1 Orwell similarly thought that ‘a new
governing class’ had emerged in Russia.2 Animal Farm and 1984 imagina-
tively reconstructed its methods and mind-set.
Djilas’s analysis of this new class did not rest on any systematic empirical
research. It could hardly have done so, since little was available about
socialist societies in the 1950s. In any case, he was under house arrest or in
prison much of the time so he could hardly contribute much to it, unless
his imaginative reconstruction of the inner thoughts of a young actress
who married into the new class, be counted as such.3 His information
about capitalist societies was dated and thin, and largely drawn, as he
admitted, from Marx himself. He was, one might say, one of Tolstoy’s
hedgehogs, who knew one big thing, that he had observed at first-hand, in
many social settings: the formation of a class which flatly contradicted
Marx’s central proposition. It was because he refused to keep quiet about
this discovery, he spent nine years in Yugoslavian prisons.
In various later writings after his release, Djilas elaborated a little on
some of the peculiar dynamics of ‘the new class’ he had discovered. ‘In past
societies’, he argued, when a class ‘arrived in power’ it was ‘the final act of
its formation and its awareness of selfhood’, whereas ‘the new class was
19
finally formed after it itself had come to power.’ Compared with previous
classes therefore, ‘the cart came before the horse, because this new class
had not taken root in the life of the nation beforehand.’ The ‘roots of this
new class lay … in that stratum of professional revolutionaries who con-
stituted its core before the Party as a whole came to power. Out of that very
thin layer of revolutionaries there developed by degrees a completely new
ruling class, of owners and exploiters.’ They ‘first created the Party’, which
then ‘spawned the class’, and then ‘the class grew on its own, using the
Party as a basis.’ Since the Party ‘drew strength from the proletariat’s strug-
gles and antagonisms’, it was ‘compelled to construct the most rigorous
organizational structure possible and to think through its public statements
with extreme care. It was therefore more class conscious, and more organ-
ized than any class in history.’ Moreover, it used its political power to
silence civil society completely. It ‘dealt with challengers … whenever they
questioned its illusions or contested its supremacy, more harshly than any
other.’ In time, ‘ever more irresistibly, the party attracted into its ranks
those spurred on by greed who wished only to insinuate themselves into
this new class and climb its rungs, while pushing out those whose eyes
were still fixed on ideals.’ As ‘the class grew stronger – the Party declined.’4
Classes in Western societies remain a shadowy foil throughout Djilas’s
explanation of the dynamics of the new class, but despite this lop-sidedness
his work still commands our attention for two reasons. First, it made the
most emphatic claim on the role of political power in the formation of
classes, and thereby offered a bold and novel hypothesis about the for-
mation of a class in stark contrast to the Marxist and Weberian perspectives
to which social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic at the time had
grown accustomed. Second, it has stood the test of time rather well, better
it seems than any other twentieth-century theory of class, being corro-
borated and routinely adopted both by those who lived under the Soviet
regime, as well as by foreign observers who have studied it and its post-
Soviet successor.
Andrei Sakharov was one of those who observed the new class from
within, indeed he was a member of it, before affirming his membership of
an older Russian class, the intelligentsia. In 1975 he remarked that ‘the
nomenklatura, as its members call themselves, or the “new class” as Milovan
Djilas has named them … has its own life style, its own clearly defined
social status … and its own way of talking and thinking … and has recently
become hereditary. The nomenklatura has in fact an inalienable status.’ He
then went on to liken it to the ‘inner party’ of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984.
More than 25 years later, the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to
a similar conclusion. In 2001, in a speech on the tenth anniversary of the
coup against him, he argued that it had been organized to defend the pri-
vileges of the nomenklatura.5 Correspondents of Western newspapers in
Moscow in the Soviet era were among the first to report on the distinctions
Lessons from Comparative Theories 21
between the nomenklatura and the rest of the population. Various Russian
and non-Russian scholars later spelt out the full range of privileges it enjoyed.6
Many analysts have subsequently observed that it continued to play a central
role in Russian life even after the fall of the Soviet regime.7 More support
came from the only researcher who was able to utilize the normal social
science methods to study class differences in a socialist society, Pavel
Machonin, who documented the clone of the Soviet nomenklatura in
Czechoslovakia.8
Because of the primacy it gave to the political determinants of class for-
mation and because it was subsequently supported by the facts, Djilas’s
argument provides a convenient preliminary marker by which we can
assess the merits of the comparative theories that subsequently began to
appear on both sides of the Atlantic. These theoretical efforts tended to move
in rather different directions. The British, led by an expatriate German, were
inclined to continue the century-long debate with Marx, and attempted to
characterize the class structures of capitalist and industrial societies as a
whole. Contemporaneous American efforts stuck closer to social mobility
research, and in particular to the occupational prestige scales which were
the accepted prerequisite of them all. However, despite their differences,
most of these theoretical forays sought to include the Soviet Union and
other socialist societies. We may therefore ask whether any of them accom-
modated the established facts about these societies in at least as satisfactory
a manner as Djilas, and whether they improved on his rather rudimentary
comparisons with capitalist societies.
Post-Marxist theories in Britain
Dahrendorf was the first academic sociologist to react to Djilas’s essay.

He was then trying to formulate a new ‘general theory’ of class. His central
proposition was that this required the replacement of Marx’s narrow
definition of property in favour of a broader, more realistic definition of
property rights to include those who controlled the means of production.
Class could then be taken to refer to possession of, or exclusion from,
authority, and this amendment would, he argued, allow the construction
of a new general theory.9 For this reason, he was happy to accept Djilas’s
support for the view that classes need not be exclusively derived from
property and ownership. However, he declined to make any further use of
Djilas’s argument that political power might be used to make classes, on the
grounds that it ‘cannot easily be applied to other countries’. Contrary to
Djilas’s personal observations, and with no supporting empirical evidence
whatever, Dahrendorf claimed that the ‘new class’ of socialist societies, ‘far
from being a homogeneous entity, is a highly explosive unit in which local
and central, industrial and agricultural, dogmatic and adaptive, bureau-
cratic and entrepreneurial “pressure groups” struggle for domination.’10
On the face of things, one might have thought that the analysis of authority
would require the introduction of political decisions and political events,
since political power commonly shapes and legitimizes structures of authority,
and that Dahrendorf would therefore wish to incorporate Djilas’s argument
and evidence into his theory. But it was not to be. ‘Class signifies conflict
groups that are generated by the differential distribution of authority in
imperatively co-ordinated associations’, Dahrendorf explained, ‘but the
structural origins of such group conflicts must be sought in the arrange-
ment of social roles endowed with expectations of domination or sub-
jection.’ And such group conflicts, he went on, ‘are not the product of
structurally fortuitous relations of power but come forth wherever author-
ity is exercised – and that means in all societies under all historical con-
ditions.’11 Djilas’s analysis, of course, rested squarely on the way that
‘structurally fortuitous relations of power’ had shaped ‘expectations of
domination or subjection’ in all socialist societies, so he could make no
further contribution to Dahrendorf’s theory-building.
In hindsight, Dahrendorf’s rejection of Djilas’s argument looks like one
of the more decisive, and unfortunate, turning points in the study of social
stratification, for though no one subsequently made any use of the general
theory that he proposed, many followed his rejection of Djilas’s analysis,
especially those who later sought to characterize and compare the strati-
fication of capitalist and socialist societies, as Parkin did in 1972. He sug-
gested that classes in capitalist societies were determined by market forces,
while the stratification of socialist societies was determined by political
decisions. He therefore agreed with Djilas on one point, namely, the
primacy of political action in socialist societies. He was, however, at some
pains to distinguish his argument from that of Djilas. He thought it ‘doubt-
ful’, for instance, ‘whether we should represent the system of inequalities
(in socialist societies) in terms of a traditional class model’, given ‘the
absence of inherited property in them’ and the ‘large-scale movements
across the entire range of the reward hierarchy’. He placed particular em-
phasis on the absence of class barriers between non-manual and manual
workers in socialist societies, and concluded that the ‘theorists who claim
that socialist society is “classless” because it lacks sharp normative differen-
tiation have thus touched upon an important feature of this type of society.’12
Parkin never, in fact, recognized a ‘new class’ or any other class in any
socialist society. He admitted that the technical and professional intelli-
gentsia of socialist societies were recruited to a much greater extent than in
capitalist societies from universities, but he portrayed this not as a class dif-
ference, but merely as a ‘social discontinuity’. He made no reference to
other ‘social discontinuities’ in these societies, such as the nomenklatura, or
to the millions of geks, the inmates of labour camps.
In an essay published a year later, Giddens echoed Parkin’s arguments.
Djilas’s ‘new class’ thesis was, he said, ‘overstated’. The ‘new class’, he
declared, ‘is not an appropriate mode of designating the place of the Party in
this type of society, or of the system of privilege which has become built up
around it.’ He admitted that the ‘power exercised by the higher Party officials
considerably outstrips that wielded by political elites in the capitalist societies;
and party positions may be, as Djilas emphasizes, means for the attainment of
a distinctively high level of economic reward.’ But ‘to admit the factual valid-
ity of these statements is not to demonstrate the emergence of a class forma-
tion comparable to that typical of capitalist society.’ Nor, he added without
further elaboration, ‘can such a case be plausibly made out for the intel-
ligentsia’. Overall, Giddens concluded that, in capitalist society, ‘the class
system continues to constitute the fundamental axis of the social structure,
and remains the main channel of relationships of exploitative domination.
The state socialist societies on the other hand, have genuinely succeeded in
moving towards a classless order.’13 They had, for instance, limited the ‘emer-
gence of class structuration at the top … primarily because the abolition of
private property prevented the transmission of advantages across generations.’
They had therefore, he thought, created a ‘much more open system of elite
mobility than that which characterizes the capitalist societies as a whole.’
Moreover, by reducing the differentials, in income, job security and fringe
benefits, between blue and white collar workers, state socialist societies had
ensured that the division between manual and non-manual labour ‘does
not have the same class significance’, and ‘lower non-manual occupations
do not form the sort of “buffer zone” which they do in capitalist societies.’
Like Parkin, Giddens also noted the importance of educational qualifica-
tions for access to higher managerial positions in socialist societies but
decided, for some unexplained reason, that this was not a process of class
structuration.14
Much of the evidence used to support the contrast between socialist and
capitalist societies by Parkin and Giddens was subsequently shown to be
false. There was no ‘buffer zone’ of mobility between white and blue collar
workers in Britain.15 Soviet Russia at the time when they were writing was
not a particularly egalitarian or mobile society.16 The notion that inequal-
ities in socialist societies were generically different from those of capitalist
societies was further thrown into question by detailed comparative studies
of the links between social background and education and between edu-
cation and social destination which showed that the differences between
two socialist societies in the 1970s, Poland and Hungary, ‘were at least as
large as those between the Western European nations’.17 There seems there-
fore little reason to accept the categorical distinction they drew between
socialist societies whose stratification was politically determined and never
resulted in classes, and capitalist societies which were, as Giddens put it,
‘intrinsically’ class societies, and owed nothing one way or the other polit-
ical leaders, events or decisions, since their classes were ‘founded ultimately
in the economic structure of the capitalist market.’18
Exactly why it proved so difficult for all three of these social theorists to
incorporate political power and political decisions into their analyses of
classes in capitalist societies is still rather puzzling. Social historians and
sociologists without theoretical ambitions seem to have had no difficulty,
or hesitation, in doing so.19 Perhaps, as social theorists they felt it necessary
to draw a sharp analytical distinction between estates of feudal societies,
whose rights and privileges were formally defined in law, and classes in
capitalist societies whose defining characteristic was precisely the absence
of any such formal, legal definition. This widely-accepted contrast may
therefore have led them to underestimate the possibility that the state
might continue to contribute to the formation of classes in capitalist
societies, even if it did not formally delineate classes. Or perhaps it was
simply that political events and decisions seemed too specific to a par-
ticular society to be fitted into any general, theoretical framework that they
could think of. There was a hint of irritation in Dahrendorf’s remark that
Djilas’s theory ‘could not be easily applied to other countries’, and it might
have been shared by the others.
The legacy of the three major classical social theorists, in whose footsteps
these late twentieth-century theorists were all explicitly treading, could not
have helped, since those revered figures had all tended to underestimate
the impact of political power on social structures. Weber had been the
most likely of them to introduce it into his analysis of stratification, since
he recognized power or party as one dimension of stratification.20 But he
died before he could fully explain and illustrate this third dimension, and
in his discussion of class there is much common ground with Marx. ‘The
factor that creates “class”’, he wrote, ‘is unambiguously economic interest.’
As Wright observed, ‘posing Marx and Weber as polar opposites is a bit
misleading because in many ways Weber is speaking in his most Marxian
voice when he talks about class.’21
Marx himself of course continuously referred to political leaders, events
and decisions when discussing class formation and class conflicts, and in
this respect his writings present a marked contrast with most of his follow-
ers where politicians and political events hardly rate a mention.22
Dahrendorf was able to cite ‘a multitude’ of his statements to document
what he thought ‘may well be the most important step’ in Marx’s theory of
class formation, namely that classes did not consist of the mere ‘gap
between the conditions of life’ or mere ‘identity of interests’ and did not
‘constitute themselves as such until they participate in political conflicts as
organized groups.’ Hence ‘class formation and class conflict were phenom-
ena belonging to the sphere of politics’ and involved ‘the association of
people in a strict group, party or political organization.’23 Marx did not,
however, incorporate this theme into his theory of class, and most of his
followers have therefore focused on the initial economic determinants of
their formation, rather than political ones that might be said to complete
it. Something of his economic determinism seem to cling to all those who
have sought to construct class theories, even to those who disagree with
him on many points, including Dahrendorf. He seemed determined to dis-
tance his theory from that of Marx, insisting that ‘classes are neither pri-
marily nor at all economic groupings’, but nevertheless did not entirely
shake off his influence. He hoped, after all, to devise a general theory of
class in industrial society, which is an economic rather than a political cat-
egory, and implies stages of pre-industrial and post-industrial development
in the manner of Marx. Moreover, his whole effort to construct a theory of
class which would identify its common properties ‘in all societies under all
historical conditions’ was Marxist in inspiration and ambition.24
Whatever their reason for excluding the political determinants of class in
capitalist societies, it seems clear these three works can provide little insight
into the sources of variation between capitalist societies, and little help
therefore in solving the English mystery.25 None of the three, moreover,
can help understand the structured inequalities of socialist societies in a
more illuminating manner than Djilas suggested. Parkin said nothing of
the origins, varieties and careers of their ‘social discontinuities’. While
Giddens was sure that Djilas had not chosen the ‘appropriate mode of
designating’ the structured inequalities of socialist societies, he could only
suggest that they were characterized by ‘a system of closely knit elite
integration’ though why this is more ‘appropriate’ or illuminating than
referring to a ruling class he did not say.26
The general reaction to Djilas’s argument among British social scientists
was therefore dismissive, even hostile. Rather than trying to show what the
variations and limits of political power might be in the process class forma-
tion, they rejected his ideas outright. In so doing they contributed to the
divergence between specialist, sociological analyses of class and public dis-
cussions of the subject which has continued ever since. While Djilas was
readily intelligible and persuasive to the general public, they were neither.
In the academic world, however, as three influential sociological works
from Oxford, Cambridge and London had confidently agreed that Djilas’s
personal testimony could be dismissed, and that he had misunderstood the
nature of inequality in socialist societies, he was not thereafter thought to
have anything much to contribute to discussions of class, and was excom-
municated from the sociological canon.27
In 1987, Hamilton and Hirszowicz’s popular text repeated what seems by
then to have become a standard sociological interpretation of inequality in
socialist societies – in Britain at least. They first warned that the problem of
inequality is ‘much more complicated than a theory of the “new class” or
“red bourgeoisie”’, and referred, presumably with Djilas in mind, though
like any heretic he is never mentioned by name, to ‘the sterility of the
class-oriented approach with regard to communist systems.’ They con-
cluded that ‘a model based on class cannot be meaningfully applied to
explain economic, social and political differences in these societies’, but

declined to say what model might be ‘meaningfully applied’ in its place.28
Instead, they divided the Soviet population neutrally into categories of
workers, peasants, intelligentsia and party-state bureaucracy, and then com-
prehensively, and insightfully, documented the differences or inequalities
between them, while managing never to say saying what these categories
were, except that they were not classes. The word had, it seems, to be
scrupulously avoided in the discussion of socialist societies.
Over the subsequent decades, no one in Britain proposed an alternative
strategy of comparative analysis that paid any attention to the politics of
class formation. In 1997, Devine conducted a thorough review of stra-
tification studies in the U.S. and Britain, placing them side-by-side wher-
ever possible, and identifying points of resemblance and contrast, but she
did not attempt to provide a comparative framework that we might apply
to these or any other societies.29 Debates about class continued with much
of their customary vehemence, though to a declining, and increasingly
sceptical, audience and to intermittent Pythonesque heckling that the
parrot is not just sick but dead. Attention turned to how gender and ethnic
inequalities, which had become of greater interest, might be reconciled
with, incorporated in, or better subordinated to, a class analysis.30 In 2000,
Savage, having decided that classical Marxist and Weberian traditions of
class analysis were both exhausted, and in the face of evidence that class
was no longer a significant source of identity in Britain, sought to rescue
class analysis by portraying it as ‘an individuated process’. Evidence of col-
lective consciousness, collective institutions and collective action was, in
his view, no longer required. Class cultures were to be seen as ‘contingently
embodying forms of individualized identities which operate relationally’, a
difficult notion for other researchers to handle, even perhaps for the author
himself, and holding little promise for cross-societal comparative analysis.31
In recent years comparative analysis has been left to social historians, and
conceptual frameworks are not their strong suit.32
Comparison via correlation coefficients in the United States
Over the same period as these post-Marxist discussions were unfolding in

Britain, some American scholars were taking advantage of the ordinal scales
of occupational prestige that were the foundation of studies of social
mobility then being undertaken in several countries, to speculate about the
nature and determinants of stratification. In 1956, Inkeles and Rossi com-
pared five scales that had been used in mobility studies from the United
States, Japan, New Zealand, Germany and Britain. Finding high rank-order
correlation coefficients between the positions of individual occupations on
these scales, they concluded that, to all intents and purposes, they were the
same. To explain this cross-national uniformity, they then suggested that ‘a
great deal of weight must be given to the cross-national similarities in

social structure, which arise from the industrial system and from other
common structural features, such as the national state.’33
Over the next few years, studies of social mobility increased in popu-
larity, and the number of occupational prestige scales therefore multiplied
rapidly. In 1962, Hodge, Treiman and Rossi, were able to compare those of
23 societies. They once again found high rank-order correlation coefficients
between them, and were similarly impressed by their uniformity, but since
the 23 included several semi-industrial societies, they decided that the
industrial system could not be a primary determinant of this uniformity.
They therefore amended Inkeles and Rossi’s original proposition by stress-
ing the needs of the state. In their view, the uniformity between these
societies was a consequence of the ‘major institutional complexes serving
central societal needs which exist in all societies’, and ‘the common bureau-
cratic hierarchy imposed by the nation state’. These, they suggested, acted
‘to insure (despite vast differences in level of economic development)
similarity between nations in the white collar prestige hierarchy, and to a
lesser extent, in the blue collar hierarchy.’34
In 1979, Treiman had more than a hundred prestige scales available,
from more than 60 contemporary societies at varying different stages of
economic development. Like his predecessors he also was struck by the
high correlations between the scales of different countries, and argued that
these high correlations were best explained, neither by industry nor by the
state, but by the division of labour. In all societies, he suggested, a division
of labour will necessarily develop, and it will, moreover, develop in a
similar way. In his own pithy, Pythagorean phrasing: ‘since the division of
labour gives rise to characteristic differences in power, and power begets
privilege, and power and privilege beget prestige, there should be a single,
worldwide occupational prestige hierarchy.’ The correlations he had found
between the scales demonstrated, to his satisfaction, that there was.35
The theoretical ambition and confidence of these three American studies
evidently increased along with the number of scales of occupational pres-
tige available. Inkeles and Rossi’s modest observations grew into Treiman’s
full-blown universal theorem. All three of them, one may notice, referred
to the role of political power in creating the prestige of occupations. Inkeles
and Rossi included the ‘national state’ among the ‘common structural
features’ of industrial societies. Hodge, Treiman and Rossi claimed that the
nation-state imposed a ‘common bureaucratic hierarchy’, and Treiman
argued that the distribution of ‘power and privilege’ determined the dis-
tribution of prestige. To that extent, there was a link with Djilas’s thesis,
though none saw any reason to develop it or even mention his work. One
possible reason they declined to do so was that the correlation coefficients
had already persuaded them to look for a uniform factor, not a differentiat-
ing one – and Djilas’s portrayal of new class was precisely that. However,
the more likely reason, it seems safe to say, was that the data admitted into
their comparison had to meet certain methodological requirements, and
Djilas’s anecdotes and unsystematic personal observations, first-hand and
unique as they might be, simply did not meet them. Since we are hoping to
find ideas that might assist this comparative investigation, it is worth
pausing briefly to identify these methodological requirements, so that we
too may decide whether to insist on them, or discard them.
To begin with, it is clear that to enable such comparisons to be con-
ducted, these researchers felt they had to ignore a variety of commonly
observed features of occupations in their subject societies, on the grounds
that were so peculiar that they could not find any immediate basis of com-
parison with other societies. Thus, to allow Soviet occupations to be
included in the comparison, the nomenklatura and full-time party appa-
ratchiks had to be excluded, as had geks, since capitalist societies had no
‘occupations’ comparable to these. Correspondingly, entrepreneurs had
to be omitted from the American side, because Soviet Russia, supposedly,
had none. Forms of status distinction that intersected a single occupation,
such as that between the favoured ‘public’ and the disadvantaged ‘private’
sector of French medicine, for example, or between the engineers from the
grandes écoles and those who graduated from mere universities, and self-
taught ingènieurs maisons also had to be forgotten. Likewise the differences
between employees in the size of firms, which have often been found to be
much more important than skill in differentiating the status of Japanese
workers, had to be ignored, as well of course as something as unique as the
Britain’s titled aristocracy and its system of honours.
To make their comparisons viable, they also had to overlook the fact that
occupations, both professional and craft, have had remarkably varied histo-
ries. In some societies, most notably England, professions had a long
history of autonomous collective organization and action, during which
they accumulated considerable powers of self-government over training,
credentials, jurisdiction and discipline, while in other societies professions
had been organized by the state and exercised few self-governing powers
and had little capacity for collective action. Similarly, in some societies,
again most notably in England, craftsmen and skilled workers had been
commonly organized as independent and exclusive trade unions, while in
others, craft or occupation has been quickly submerged in, or replaced by,
other bases of union organization such as the plant, the firm, the industry
or, as in France, by political beliefs, all of which attempted to unite workers
of every kind, skilled and unskilled, white collar and blue collar.
In sum, the methodology of these comparative analyses required the
researcher to compile a uniform list of occupations for each country, and to
exclude those that were unique, then to assume that all occupations were
uniformly defined and demarcated, equally independent of one another,
equally self-conscious and equally cohesive in all the societies being com-
pared. When occupations in all the subject societies had been converted
into cross-culturally standardized units like so many social euros, the com-
parison could then proceed to measure the degree of similarity between
the prestige of occupations in all the countries by calculating rank-order
correlation coefficients.
Both steps in this form of comparative analysis are suspect. First, the pre-
ferred measure of similarity is defective. A study of 12 ‘orders of pre-
cedence’ issued over some 200 years by the Lord-Mayor of the City of
London, to determine the position or ‘stations’ of its guilds or ‘companies’
on public occasions, found that most were above 0.86, and all of those in
the 16th century were above 0.93. Nonetheless, there were over this period
dramatic, and well-documented, shifts up and down the orders of pre-
cedence, which sometimes provoked violent conflicts between companies.
Even correlation coefficients of 0.93 and above, therefore, do not entitle
one to claim uniformity and stability, and there is no reason to pay much
attention to those who claim it on the basis of lower coefficients.36 The
second objection is that the standardized units have already been stripped
of the things that made them distinctive, and necessarily therefore have a
considerable degree of uniformity imposed on them, even before calculat-
ing coefficients between the social skeletons that remain.
When social mobility research is based on such prestige scales, it incorpo-
rates these defects, and similarly tends to exaggerate the uniformity between
societies. However, it need not always do so. The number of societies com-
pared evidently makes a difference. When, for instance, Ishida compared just
three countries, Japan, the United States and Britain, he had the time, and the
knowledge, to explain some of their historical and institutional peculiarities,
and hence put back, or re-contextualize, much that his methodology had
compelled him to remove or ignore.37 His study therefore raised more inter-
esting questions for subsequent investigation than any of the multiple-
country studies. Connor similarly worked with a small number of socialist
and capitalist societies, and was able to support and explain mobility data by
reference to the history and politics of each, an effort which prompted him to
put forward the startling proposition that, rather than comparing capitalist
and socialist societies, it would be more illuminating to compare Europe, both
capitalist and socialist, with the ‘non-egalitarian classless’ societies of the
United States and Soviet Russia.38 Comparative mobility studies of particular
sectors, like Granick’s or Cassis’ comparisons of managers cited above, also do
not have to deprive their subjects of everything that might distinguish them
before proceeding. They were able to supplement and explain their mobility
data with historical and contemporary behavioural evidence, and therefore
found more interesting and illuminating differences between their chosen
societies than ‘constant flux’.
In the end, the lesson that we may draw from this review of the approaches
to the comparative analyses of stratification is not so different from the
lesson we drew from our consideration of the structural approaches of the

British. In their case, it was the search for a general theory that had, we
decided, prevented adequate attention being paid to historical and political
factors in the formation or dissolution of classes. In the case of these
American studies, the search for methodological rigour, and for standard-
ized units of comparison, had the same result.
General theory and methodological rigour are, of course, worthy goals,
but the pursuit of both may, it seems, be sought prematurely, and at
unacceptable cost. If, instead of setting off in pursuit of a general theory,
true of ‘all societies under all historical conditions’, or of all capitalist
societies, would-be theorists had set themselves more modest goals, and
referred to a limited number of societies, it would have been possible to
take account of their distinctive historical and political experiences, indeed
impossible to ignore them. The same might be said of the theories derived
from the ordinal ranking of occupations. Once the comparison embraced
dozens of societies, however, everything that made a society distinctive had
to be discarded, and it was only possible to compare skeletal remains.
By contrast, when only a small number were being compared, as Ishida,
Connor and Granick among others have demonstrated, it was entirely
possible not only to recall and take account of their peculiarities, but also
to illuminate and understand them. The moral for comparative analysis
seems to be: small is beautiful. If we compare too many societies, we run
the risk of standardizing and eliminating historical events and institutional
peculiarities that ought to remain a part of the comparison.
A bold step backwards
All of the approaches we have examined thus far were proposed in the
third quarter of the twentieth century, and it is curious, given the fre-
quency with which social scientists have subsequently moved around the
world, that they should have had few successors. After the fall of the real
Berlin Wall, comparisons of capitalist and socialist societies inevitably lost
much of their rationale, and the failure of multiple-country, cross-national
studies of mobility to contribute anything to the understanding of societies
included in them might have discouraged other kinds of comparative ana-
lysis. In recent times, discussion of globalization seems to have smothered
interest in national peculiarities.
There was, however, one lonely, rather startling, exception to the general
rule: Wright’s comparison of capitalist societies published in 1997.39 Its first
surprise was that it was conducted with an explicitly Marxist framework.
The earlier studies discussed above had all assumed that Marx’s work was
passé, and should be either rejected, radically revised, or ignored. Moreover,
since Marxism had long served as an ideology of repression around the
world, his theory had inevitably also fallen into some disrepute. Wright,
however, was not at all discouraged by such considerations, and even

hoped that he might convert ‘non-Marxists skeptical of the fruitfulness
of Marxism as a theoretical framework’.40 His results were still more sur-
prising, for it seems fair to say that he identified more interesting cross-
national variations among the three capitalist societies on which he focused
than had emerged from most of the preceding comparative studies.
He began in an orthodox Marxist manner by dividing the population of
capitalist societies into owners and employees and added his own further
divisions; of owners into three class locations according to the number of
their employees, and of employees into three more locations according
to ‘the relations of domination and exploitation’ that he thought they
entailed, and then a further three more according to their level of skill. This
gave him 12 ‘class locations’, though a considerable proportion of these
populations ended up in ‘contradictory’ class locations, meaning they were
linked to the process of exploitation and domination in contradictory
ways. Managers were the classic example, since they were non-owners, and
therefore among the exploited, but simultaneously engaged in domination
and exploitation on behalf of the capitalist class, and therefore among the
exploiters, but they were only one example. In fact, almost everyone who
was neither a capitalist nor a proletarian seems to be in a ‘contradictory’
class location. About a third of his samples were also in ‘mediated’ class
locations, meaning that they had a foot in at least two class locations, as
for instance when respondents were in a working class location but their
spouse in a middle class one.41 One imagines that if Wright had continued
this kind of analysis over generations, or included siblings, the overwhelm-
ing majority of his populations would have been found to be in either
‘contradictory’ or ‘mediated’ class locations. In the event, it did not matter
much, since neither the 12 locations, nor the ‘contradictory’ or ‘mediated’
classes, were used to identify new class formations, but simply to deter-
mine, on the basis of responses to attitude surveys in these societies, whe-
ther or not they aligned themselves with three familiar, non-contradictory,
non-mediated, Marxist classes of employers, petty bourgeoisie and working
class.42
The attitude surveys he drew on were conducted in seven industrial
societies during the 1980s, though he focused for the most part on just
three: Sweden, the United States and Japan. His comparison proceeded
in two steps. The first was to confirm some basic uniformity of these
societies which defined them as capitalist, and in most cases, though
not all, vindicated Marx’s view of them. His second step was to iden-
tify ‘anomalies’, ‘departures’ or ‘surprises’ that did not square with what
he called the ‘usual Marxist analysis’, a few of which he attempted to
explain.
Having, for instance first established that the working class, as he defined
it, was ‘still the most numerous’ in all of these societies, he then noted that
the Swedish working class was proportionately larger than that of the United
States, and its managerial class correspondingly smaller. To explain this dif-
ference, he referred briefly to ‘the political specificity’ of the Swedish ‘social
democratic compromise’, negotiated decades before, under which workers
agreed to moderate their militancy in exchange for guarantees that wages
would rise more or less in step with productivity and that unemployment
would be kept to a minimum. This might, he suggested, have ‘reduced the
need for intensive supervision and surveillance of the labour process’ in
Sweden.43
A second uniformity was the rate of self-employment, which he found
had not declined, and hence, contrary to the ‘usual Marxist analysis’, the
‘petty bourgeoisie’ was not disappearing, and ‘the class structure of capital-
ism’ was becoming ‘increasingly complex rather than simplified around a
single class antagonism.’44 In the United States, however, self-employment
had not merely ceased to decline, but had increased significantly, while in
Japan it had halted at a rate more than four times higher than that of
Sweden. To explain the American ‘anomaly’, he raised a number of poss-
ibilities, such as the growth of the service sector and of the post-industrial
economy, the entry of the ‘baby boom’ generation into the age range when
self-employment was more likely, and the surge in the employment of
married women. He also wondered whether it might simply be an illusion
due to changes of nomenclature, or of the method by which employers
hired labour.45 To explain the Japanese anomaly he could only add, rather
feebly, that small firms in Japan were dominated by traditional family
enterprises.46
A third uniformity was the ‘class polarization’ in all three societies,
meaning that the working class were more likely to express anti-capitalist
and pro-state attitudes than capitalists. However, he then went on to observe
that the Swedish working class was more anti-capitalist than the American,
and its middle class was less likely to think its interests were the same as
those of the capitalist class, differences which he attributed to the much
higher proportion of the labour force in Sweden that was employed by the
state, and the higher proportion that was unionized.47 However, the Japanese
were even less class polarized than Americans, an ‘anomaly’ that he sought
to explain by arguing that Japanese trade unions were ‘basically like com-
pany unions’, so that ‘the concrete organizational context may have a bigger
impact on the micro-relationship between an individual’s class location
and class consciousness than is usually suggested within Marxist class
analysis.’48
When he turned to analyse female respondents, he was again able to
identify one basic pattern which ‘is the same across all countries: women
are much more proletarianized than men’. There are, however, ‘very sharp
differences’ in the class distributions of males and females in his subject
countries. Women in three English-speaking countries (the United States,
Canada, and the U.K.) were more than twice as likely to exercise authority
in the workplace than in Sweden and Norway, and six times more likely
than in Japan, but at this point the cross-cultural variations outrun the
time and space for explanations.
Unfortunately, this is also the case with the host of variations that arise in
the most innovative part of his study, a comparison of cross-societal varia-
tions in the ‘permeability’ of three class boundaries, those of ownership,
authority and skill, to three kinds of cross-class movement, inter-generational
mobility, friendship and marriage. Among other things he found that mar-
riage across the property barrier, and inter-generational mobility across the
authority barrier, is rather higher in the U.S. than in Sweden, while marriage
across the authority barrier is somewhat lower, and friendship across the prop-
erty barrier very much lower.49 Among women in all these societies, however,
the property barrier is more permeable than both the authority and skill bar-
riers, which is a result, he suggested, of ‘the operation of marriage markets’.50
After provocatively identifying a somewhat bewildering number of such vari-
ations, he could, however, identify a reassuring uniformity, among men at
least, which lends ‘support to the general expectation in Marxist class analysis
that the property dimension of the class structure remains the most funda-
mental in capitalist societies.’ The ‘boundary Marxists predict to be the least
permeable is indeed the least permeable’, and it is the least permeable of all in
the ‘most capitalist society’ of all, the United States.51
What are we to make of these ingenious and provocative comparisons?
Do they mean that Djilas’s critique was not quite so fatal after all and that
he had no need to upend Marx? Or that Marxist theory has a previously
unsuspected potential for comparative analysis?
Wright’s use of Marx is, one must first observe, both selective and inven-
tive, both less and more than ‘the usual Marxist analysis’. Less, because it is
Marx without wheels. He says nothing about the dynamics over time of the
‘more complex class antagonisms’ that he referred to. More, because Marx
and Marxists have not said much about ‘permeability’, or about cross-
cultural differences in mobility, friendship and marriage, and their theor-
etical contribution to this part of his research is fanciful, a thought that
seems to have crossed his mind.52 More importantly in the present context,
it is clear that having provided the model, Marx can make no contribution
to any of the ‘departures’ from it. Wright was then out on his own, and
almost invariably responded with ad hoc, compressed references to political
events and decisions, such as the references mentioned above to Sweden’s
‘social democratic compromise’ to explain their lesser managerial controls,
or to the ‘heavy influence of (its) macro-societal context’ to explain its
higher class polarization, or to Japan’s ‘concrete organizational context’
and the defeat of its militant unions in the early 1950s to explain its low
level of class consciousness.53 He did not, therefore, propose any new
theory or method of comparative analysis that might make sense of the many
cross-societal variations his surveys threw up, excusing himself on the grounds
that his data did not allow him to evaluate ‘alternative explanations of the
cross-societal patterns in class formation we have been mapping out.’ ‘Ulti-
mately’, he thought, ‘this would require constructing an account of the his-
torical trajectory in each country of class struggles and institution building,
especially of unions, parties and states.’ A satisfactory comparative analysis
would, in other words, focus on political events and decisions, in a contin-
uous and systematic manner rather than his own ad hoc random references.54
It is an odd conclusion, more contrary perhaps to the ‘usual Marxist ana-
lysis’ than anything else in his work, but then he did not pursue all the ‘anom-
alies’ and ‘departures’ from Marxist writ with equal vigour or interest. The
outstanding example is his finding that Sweden was not only the most class-
polarized society, but also had the most public employment and was the most
unionized. This naturally leads one to suppose that class polarization has less
to do with capitalist development than with the political decisions that led to
both the extension of public ownership and to the encouragement of trade
union membership, but he does not entertain the thought.55 In the end, his
work impresses more for its devotion to the Marxist cause, and to the ingenu-
ity and perseverance with which he seeks to salvage Marx’s theory, than for
the discovery of some previously overlooked Marxist method of comparative
investigation. He showed that Marx’s theory can serve as a heuristic model,
though no one ever doubted that. Djilas used it as such. He utterly failed,
however, to show that cross-societal variations of authority or social mobility
or intermarriage or managerial control, or any of the other variables he
identified, are illuminated in any way by reference to Marx. Far from provid-
ing any promising analytical categories or strategies that would enable us
to improve on Djilas’ rudimentary argument, he could only suggest that ‘ulti-
mately’ it would be necessary to do precisely what Djilas had begun to do
40 years earlier when he had outlined the ‘historical trajectory’ of the for-
mation of a new class in Soviet Russia.56
Wright did not therefore provide a demonstrably superior method of com-
parative analysis, or indeed any method at all. And since none of the earlier
twentieth-century theorists we considered have provided any insight into the
variations in the class structures of the societies to which they referred, we can
only try to learn from the one comparative theory that has stood the test of
time rather well, that of Djilas. His theory was, as we have observed, fragmen-
tary and lop-sided, so we still have to devise an analytical framework which
will enable us to identify and compare variations in the class structures of
both socialist and capitalist societies. But we may take one important lesson
from Djilas’s effort, namely that such a framework should enable us to iden-
tify and compare the political events and decisions, as well as the political
actors and organizations, that may have contributed to the formation of
classes.
3
What Are Classes? And Who Forms
and Dissolves Them?
Class defined
The first step in devising a framework of comparative analysis must be to

define the phenomena under investigation – classes. And it follows from
the preceding discussion that a usable definition of them must not incor-
porate any explanation of their origins or determinants, whether political
or economic, and must leave us free to assess any possible contributor
to their formation. We can satisfy this requirement by defining classes
as enduring, horizontally-demarcated segments of a national population
whose members distinguish themselves from those they consider above or
beneath them in the belief that they have common interests and share a
distinct way of life.
The common interests of classes may be either privileges they enjoy or
injustices from which they suffer, but in either case they transcend those of
particular regions, industries or occupations. Classes may be regional when
they first emerge, and may well remain more clearly identified in one region
of a country rather than another, or among some occupations rather than
others, but they are national phenomena. And they endure over time. They
are not therefore responses to some passing grievance or distress. Members
of a class may define and express their shared interests by the foundation
of some kind of purposeful association that disseminates them, and less
consciously by the creation of, and participation in, distinctive institutions
that separate members of one class from other members of the same society
and enable the class to reproduce itself by transmitting its loyalties, habits
and ideals to future generations. In the course of creating their own associ-
ations and maintaining their own institutions members of a class necess-
arily interact more readily with one another than with other members of
their society, and are therefore likely to respond to political, economic and
social changes in a similar manner, to find similar ideals and ideologies
appealing, and over time therefore to form distinctive sub-cultures and
communities.1
35
It follows that classes are audible and visible social phenomena. They are
in E.P. Thompson’s memorable phrase, ‘something which in fact happens
(and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.’ 2 Their
emergence and their careers can therefore be documented in records of
their collective actions, of the associations and institutions they have
created, and with evidence from workplaces, or from political, religious,
educational and recreational activities. Since their associations and insti-
tutions both create and depend on inter-personal obligations and loyalties,
they are also, one might add, moral phenomena, with a collective con-
sciousness and even conscience, rather than mere economic interest
groups.
This definition seems to fulfil the basic requirement of comparative ana-
lysis, in that it provides generic terms to describe all possible cases that
might present themselves for analysis, and does not make any assumptions
about the origins of classes or their interests. Socialist societies need not,
therefore, remain in a classless, undefined, benign limbo. Nor need cap-
italist societies be assumed to be ‘intrinsically’ class societies. It also allows
us to examine the emergence and dynamics of classes without being locked
into the view that they are exclusively, or primarily, the product of eco-
nomic development, or that there is a predetermined or theoretically-derived
number of them in any society, or that they inherently or invariably conflict
with one another, or that all members of a society are necessarily members
of one class or another. We may therefore consider the possibility of stable,
class relationships during periods of rapid economic transformation, or of
radical changes in the class system during periods of economic stability,
and even of a decline in class sentiments, while inequalities of income and
property are increasing, a combination that we have already noticed may
be of some relevance in contemporary England.3
The two agents of class formation
Having defined classes, the next task is to identify the actors that might
contribute to their formation or dissolution. As befits an initial exploration,
we may define these actors in the broadest and least controversial way poss-
ible, and say there are just two: the state and civil society. If the latter be
taken to include any form of collective action whose initiation and con-
tinuation depends primarily on private individuals rather than on the
authority of the state or on family obligations, there can be no other rele-
vant actors, and no other form of collective action in any society. While
families may belong to classes, and help reproduce them, they can hardly
contribute to the formation of a class unless they federate or organize with
others, whereupon they become a part of civil society.
Our investigation will therefore be comparing the capacities and inclina-
tions of states and civil societies to contribute to the formation or dis-
What Are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves Them? 37
solution of classes and their effectiveness in doing so over time. Moreover,

since one is the only possible ally or opponent of the other, it follows that
the relationship between them must be the key to understanding the for-
mation and fate of classes in any society, and the central focus of any com-
parative analysis of class formation. That being so, we cannot begin the
investigation presuming that we already know what that relationship is.
We cannot assume, for instance, that the actions of one have been deter-
mined by the other, that the state for instance necessarily depends on
employers, or that associations of either employers or workers are a neces-
sary consequence of reaching a certain stage of economic development.
These two actors must initially be considered independent of one another –
artificial as that may be – and their relationships and inter-dependence, or
their degree and forms of collaboration or conflict, determined by examin-
ing the evidence in each case.
In any other social science, this caveat would not be necessary, but eco-
nomic determinism has been so deeply entrenched in sociological thought,
and especially, as we have already noted, in the study of class, and along
with it the idea that certain interrelationships can be pre-judged rather
than remain open pending empirical investigation. It may have declined
somewhat in recent times, but not that much. Devine and Savage declared,
in the volume devoted to Renewing Class Analysis published in 2000, that
‘economic determinism … has cast a long shadow over class analysis in the
last fifty years.’ However, neither they, their co-editors, nor their contri-
butors, seemed quite ready to step out of it. Their co-editors proclaimed, for
instance, that ‘processes of production, distribution and consumption … are
class processes, and they produce classes.’ They then applauded all their
contributors for attaching ‘primary importance to the study of economic
and market processes’, and sought ‘a renewal of the core concerns of the
sociology of class and stratification by considering the sociological implica-
tions of new processes of economic restructuring and the generation of
material inequalities.’ In the circumstances their own final recommenda-
tion, that ‘the economic should be brought back into class analysis’, albeit
‘as a set of practices that are imbued with cultural meanings and experiences’,
seemed a trifle redundant.4 The present investigation will, hopefully, step
more decisively out of this ‘long shadow’, and make no assumptions about
the two main actors whose behaviour and relationship will be central focus
of the analysis. Instead, we will simply introduce them, and briefly consider
the power and resources they may each bring to the task of making or
breaking classes.
States invariably have a formidable armoury of powers, by virtue of their
capacity to act on, and differentiate between sections of the entire popu-
lation of a nation. They may, for instance, decide to tax their citizens, or
grant or withhold legal, political or social rights selectively, and in so doing
divide and stratify the population in ways that are nationally recognized
and enforced, and thereby assist the formation of classes. States may also,
of course, use their powers to unmake or dissolve classes. Educational insti-
tutions controlled by the state have been an especially powerful instrument
in both respects, class-forming and class-dissolving, since schools not only
influence the aspirations, relationships and manners of their pupils, but
also determine, to a considerable degree, how, when, and at what level,
they enter the labour market and their fate within it. State-supported edu-
cational institutions are most likely to be class-forming when they are
selective at an early age, and offer distinctive curricula and careers for those
selected. They are likely to be class-inhibiting or class-dissolving when they
are open to the entire population, and have abundant entry and re-entry
points. The only class distinction that schools can then help to form is that
between those who attend and graduate from them and those who do not.
States may also help to form classes by the way they provide welfare ser-
vices, but this is likely to vary with the duration and universality of the
provision. Housing, for instance, seems likely to have a greater potential
than unemployment benefit, since public-supported housing is seldom
offered to the entire population, and thereby tends to create permanently
segregated, instantly recognizable, residential communities with some com-
mon interests. Unemployment benefits, by contrast, are more likely to be
temporary, and are therefore less likely to be class-forming. The British
National Health Service (NHS) was designed as a universal service from the
very beginning, and is therefore a rather unusual welfare institution that
has few recognizable class differences in access or delivery, and can there-
fore contribute only to the dissolution of classes. It has proved difficult to
reform, or to combine with private provision, precisely because of fear that
this would mean ‘second class’ medical care for a section of the population.
The English may have been class-ridden, but they have evidently created
at least one institution that treats everyone equally, without regard to their
class background. Orwell did not mention it, but then he did not live to see
it in action for long.
If states happen to differentiate the population simultaneously in two
or more of the ways mentioned, and these happen to coincide, then their
class-forming potential is of course increased. State powers, however, prob-
ably need no further emphasis or elaboration. They are so considerable that
any selective state policy, whatever its intention, may contribute to the
formation of classes. States may well, in other words, help to create classes
inadvertently. We will soon encounter examples. There is, however, no
reason to suppose that their powers are unlimited, and perhaps the more
open and interesting question for investigation concerns the limits of their
powers, when civil societies either fail to respond to their class-forming or
class-dissolving initiatives, or actually oppose them.
The idea that civil society, or organized groups within civil society, are
agents of class formation, seems somewhat novel at first, though only
because we have long grown accustomed to being told that classes are
formed spontaneously and exclusively by economic resources and relation-
ships, or by market transactions. If classes exist at all, however, it follows
from the definition proposed above, as indeed from most others, that their
members must have transcended their particular labour market situations,
and begun to identify themselves, and organize themselves, not only at
their workplaces, but in the wider society. In that event, politics must be
involved, since whether, when and how any civil society has organized has
been decisively affected by political decisions and is not simply a product
of blind economic forces. We may now, therefore, identify some of the
organized interests in civil society that are likely to have contributed to the
formation of classes.
The first example that springs to mind, especially after discussing Djilas’s
analysis of the new class, are political parties. For a long time, many ana-
lysts were inclined to see them simply as derivative expressions of pre-
viously formed or half-formed class interests, the classic statement of this
view being that of Duverger.5 Lenin was probably the first exponent of
the contrary view, that political parties were themselves agents of class for-
mation, and Djilas might be said to have been following him, though they
were referring of course to different classes. It was some time, however,
before Western social analysts came to accept this possibility, and incorpor-
ate it into their analyses. Sartori seems to have been the first to do so. ‘To
put it bluntly,’ he exclaimed, ‘it is not the “objective” class … that creates
the party, but the party that creates the “subjective” class … The party is
not a consequence of the class. Rather, and before, it is the class that
receives its identity from the party … large collectivities become class struc-
tured only if they are class persuaded.’6 Thereafter the idea became a more
familiar one. Cannadine later put it succinctly. ‘The task of politicians’, he
observed, ‘is the creation and manipulation of social identities, sometimes
articulated in the language of class, sometimes not. It is not so much that
“real” social identities directly inform and animate party politics, it is that
party politics is concerned with creating social identities.’7
There is, unfortunately, no convenient empirical indicator which would
enable us to determine whether, or how far, political parties have merely
been articulating the grievances of existing classes that they hope to enlist
as electoral supporters, or have themselves been creating or reinforcing new
class identities and loyalties, or of course undermining them. In the belief
that the new class had no predecessor, Djilas thought that it was a clear-cut
case of a class created by a party, but his initial assumption is not beyond
dispute. Deciding whether parties are creators, or merely voices, of classes
seems still more difficult in representative democracies, and probably only
to be decided with the available evidence to hand in each case. For the
moment, we may simply acknowledge that political parties are potential
agents both of class formation and of class dissolution, the latter being
more likely, of course, if they decline to address themselves to a particular

class and try to appeal indiscriminately to the entire electorate.
Private schools are a second voluntary organized interest in civil society
that might contribute to the formation of classes, especially if they are
numerous enough to collectively constitute a distinct sector of the educa-
tional system. Like political parties, they also have often been seen merely
as derivative and dependent, as vehicles of classes or class interests that pre-
ceded them, but they obviously have no less a claim to be considered as
active agents of class formation, as originators and perpetuators of classes
in their own right, than state educational institutions since they may
socialize their students no less indelibly. Hence, the contribution of public
and private schools to the formation or dissolution of classes has to be scru-
tinized anew in each case. How open or selective is their recruitment? How
different are their curricula? Do their differences have national reach and
recognition? Are they linked to other educational institutions, or the
labour market, in distinctive ways?
Organized occupations, such as professional associations and trade
unions, are a third set of potential agents of class formation in civil society.
Occupations have long been used as fundamental reference points by
which class membership is identified. The very first question Marx thought
of asking workers in the questionnaire he designed for the Revue Socialiste
in 1883 was: what is your occupation?8 Later students of classes, like those
we have discussed above, were therefore only following in his footsteps
when they took occupations as basic units of classes. Like Marx, however,
they usually assumed that occupations were passive, inert, uniform units of
the larger class formations which were the main actors, and the main
subject of interest and investigation. However, since we are considering the
way classes have been formed, we must consider and compare organized
occupations as constituent actors, and examine the ways they may, or may
not, have helped to shape or reinforce classes.
As already noted, their form and functions may differ greatly. Some pro-
fessional associations are powerful self-governing bodies, which control the
training, admission, work jurisdiction and behaviour of their members, and
can organize and mobilize virtually all the members of their own occu-
pation, while others are merely pressure groups, or provide optional ser-
vices for those practising professionals who care to join. Similarly, some
trade unions sharply differentiate between blue and white collar workers,
and hence may reinforce this particular distinction, and give it a class char-
acter. Others recruit, promiscuously and indiscriminately, blue collar and
white collar workers alongside technicians and professionals, and hence
may either mobilize classes on a different basis, or undermine them alto-
gether. If occupations, whether non-manual or manual, are entered after
an extended, and mandatory, period of practice-based and practitioner-
controlled training, they will probably have high rates of self-recruitment,
and their solidarity and potential contribution to class formation will prob-
ably be greater than those that require only a formal educational qualification,
and may be entered at any age. All organized occupations, however, even
those without any kind of practice-based training, are potential agents of
class formation, since they have spontaneous and continuous networks
of communication, and therefore find it easy to persuade their members of
their common interests, to internalize and uphold invidious distinctions
against outsiders, and of course, to act collectively. Their ability to organize
nationally is particularly important. After pointing out that classes could
not be defined merely by ‘their common conditions of life’ or by an ‘iden-
tity of interests’, Marx observed that something more was required: ‘In
so far as there is merely local contact – in so far as the identity of their
interests does not produce a community, national association, and political
organization – they do not constitute a class.’9
On all three counts, our definition of class allows us to agree with Marx,
as long as political organization is taken to include all varieties of political
action, and not simply parties who present candidates for political office, or
organize coups d’etat or revolutions. On Marx’s first two counts, – forming a
community and a national association – professions and trade unions have
few rivals since these two things have been among their first items of busi-
ness, and there are innumerable examples that they have done both effec-
tively. German professional associations provide one of the more striking
instances, since, as McClelland observed, they ‘carried out a large measure
of standardisation and nationalisation of professional practice’ even before
there was any genuine political structure one could call ‘Germany’, and even
though individual states ‘retained ultimate legal competence over their
activities.’10 More typically, of course, professions have followed the for-
mation of the state, and if we exclude established churches, they have
usually been the first national voluntary association of any kind, and fol-
lowed by trade unions. Together, one might say, professions and trade
unions have been the vanguard and flag-bearers of civil society.
Both have gone on, at different rates in different places, to establish their
preferred national occupational nomenclature and qualifications, and to
enforce national standards of pay and conditions, and thereby organize
national markets for their members’ services. To do these things has inevit-
ably involved some kind of political action and some kind of response from
the state. By regulating the workplace division of labour, they have also
institutionalized their relationships with occupations above, equal or below
them, and positioned themselves in the nationwide hierarchy of occu-
pations, and thereby, it seems safe to say, contributed to the formation of
classes.
Marx, however, did not think that occupations could or would provide
the ‘community, national association and political organization’ that he
thought were needed to form a class. On the contrary, he argued that class
solidarity would require the elimination of occupational solidarity, a pro-

cess that he thought the advance of the capitalist mode of production
would complete, much as it had, in his view, already obliterated occu-
pational loyalties of professionals. These processes cannot, however, be pre-
judged in this manner. If we stick to our original requirement that all
organized interests of civil society be treated as independent actors, they
must be decided by empirical investigation. Did occupational solidarity
decline in our four societies as the capitalist mode of production advanced?
If it did not, and at first glance there is little reason to think that the solid-
arity of the professions declined, was it true, as Marx assumed, that occu-
pational solidarity inhibited class solidarity, and that class solidarity only
emerged as it declined and disappeared?
By comparison with organized professions and trade unions, another
organized interest in civil society, entrepreneurs and employers, was a late
starter. Although often portrayed as founding members of civil society,
national associations of capitalist employers were long preceded by those of
professions and unions.11 The artisans’ tour de France and the English crafts-
men’s ‘tramp’ were well-established national institutions when most
employers had thought only of organizing in their own towns.12 English
barristers began to organize their inns of court in London in the late
thirteenth century, and were quite well-organized, nationally-recognized
bodies by the sixteenth, by which time they had been joined by physicians.
By that time also, journeymen and apprentices in the City of London had
formed their own corporate institutions within their guilds, and these were
the kernel from which national trade unions later emerged, which they did
long before their capitalist employers had created any kind of national
association to succeed the guilds. In most countries, as we will see, employ-
ers have only organized nationally in response to the associations of their
employees, in particular their skilled employees.13
If class requires national organization, then owners of capital, entrepre-
neurs or employers are not the pre-eminent class-builders they are some-
times cracked up to be. They have, it is true, certain decided advantages.
Being few in number, and having adequate resources at their disposal, they
have less need of permanent national communication networks, and less
need perhaps than professions and trade unions to find ways of maintain-
ing the solidarity of their members. Their solidarity and common interests
cannot, however, be taken for granted. After all, they do, sometimes, com-
pete with one another, and some win out at the expense of others. And
their economic capital is not immediately convertible into social capital.
This is hardly a controversial observation. The histories of organized labour
demonstrate over and over again, that propertyless workers can generate
abundant amounts of social capital, and often of symbolic capital, as well
as one form of capital that Bourdieu rather slighted, the craft capital of
their knowledge and dexterity.14 Entrepreneurs and employers seem more
inclined to use their symbolic and social capital for the benefit of their own
companies, rather than on behalf of entrepreneurs or property owners as a
class.
There is no reason to believe that employers caught up, so to speak, and
that their solidarity as a class has increased as the amount of financial
capital invested in their enterprises has increased. The opposite is more
likely since the roles of investor, entrepreneur and employer which were
combined in the early stages of industrialization were then differentiated
and diverged. Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, an ever-
larger proportion of capital came to be controlled by institutions rather
than by individuals. Members of the Investment Managers Association
(IMA) of the U.K., for instance, currently have ‘under management’ some
£2,000 billion.15 The decisions about where and how this vast sum should
be invested are taken by salaried experts, or supposed experts, whose main
goal is to find companies which offer a good return on an investment,
either by way of dividends or growth, or the possibility of a takeover bid.
Although these fund managers occasionally organize to press their common
interests on company boards or governments, it is difficult to take them as
agents or representatives of a capitalist class, let alone members of it, since
they are accountable only to their individual clients, rather than to a col-
lection or class of them. If these clients are nevertheless thought to form or
belong to a class, then the existence of the class clearly has to be demon-
strated by some means other than the fund in which they happen to have
invested. The idea that all investors or savers in all the managed funds
listed in the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal form a class, or a fragment
thereof, is absurd. Fund managers are also rather poor representatives or
spokespersons of a supposed capitalist class. They seldom talk in public,
and are reluctant to act, as every crusading financial journalist and activist
shareholder knows. In company disputes, they usually prefer to remain
completely passive. Abstaining is their idea of a protest vote. Of the three
options that Hirschman suggested were open to dissatisfied members of
organizations, exit, loyalty, voice, they invariably prefer the first – the Wall
Street walk – withdrawing from one company’s stock and looking for more
promising opportunities elsewhere.16 The vast accumulations of capital in
contemporary capitalism, therefore, have no articulate representatives,
other than an occasional self-appointed oddity, like Calpers or Warren
Buffett or Yoshiaki Murakami, or perhaps an ad hoc shareholders’ asso-
ciation. They therefore have no class loyalty or voice. Contemporary accu-
mulations of capital are classless, not measures of the power of the capitalist
class.
Most analysts of class, however, starting with Marx, have been less con-
cerned with the capacity of capitalists to form a class amongst or for them-
selves, which they often take for granted, than with their capacity to
provoke the formation of a working class amongst their employees. Since
this process has often been assumed to be natural or automatic, it is worth

distinguishing between employers’ capacity to generate inequalities and
their capacity to create classes. The former is limitless and endless. Cap-
italism is, by its very nature, a prodigious, perpetual engine of inequality,
continuously generating and reproducing inequalities as a matter of daily
routine, rewarding some owners and investors, some managers and even
some workers, while pitilessly punishing others. However, its significant
characteristic is that it does not reproduce and reiterate, just one funda-
mental and lasting inequality, but successive inequalities, which may
imperfectly overlap with, and therefore blur, fragment, or intersect their
predecessors. Its inequalities are therefore continuous in a statistical sense,
rather than discrete, though sociologists may, of course, present them dis-
cretely, by for instance, taking the top quintile or decile of property
owners, or the mean incomes of various kinds of occupations, and thereby
create ‘class’ distinctions in their own homes.17 Moreover, income inequal-
ities are not only continuous. They are also dynamic and unstable, rather
than categorical and durable, and need not, therefore, contribute to the for-
mation of classes. Left to itself, capitalism tends to produce only economic
differentiation and inequality rather than classes, which is another way of
repeating what has become a truism since the work of E.P. Thompson,
namely that the formation of a working class requires imagination, deter-
mination, and courage, as well as organizational skill, and it also requires
a supportive political environment. It is not an automatic by-product of
employers seeking a profit.
There is no reason, therefore, why the numerous inequalities that indi-
vidual employers continuously generate among their employees, – in power,
income, career prospects, security of employment, holiday entitlements,
bonuses and expense accounts, and shareholding or pension arrangements –
should be converted into national classes. They seem most likely to assume
a class-like form in company towns, or single-industry towns or regions
where employers are well-organized, and the distinctions they impose are
widely-known, consistent with one another, and embrace an entire com-
munity. Industries with national associations and national collective bar-
gaining, may also give the inequalities they create a wider, regional or
national significance, though in such cases, employers usually require the
collaboration of the state or of trade unions, or both. More commonly,
individual employers seem to have preferred to act independently in the
marketplace, and to have lacked either effective mechanisms or strong
incentives, to enforce national standards of income and status. Such differ-
entiation as they imposed on their employees could often, therefore,
remain idiosyncratic and local. It was trade unions and professional associ-
ations that forced them to recognize national qualifications and national
rates, and to take part in national bargaining. This was clearly grasped by
the Thatcher and Major governments in the 1980s and 1990s in Britain.
Both consistently sought to dismantle national bargaining structures erected

by professions and trade unions, so that employers could respond to diverse
local market conditions. The former protested, the latter did not.
How will we identify classes?
This completes the preliminaries, a rather modest set perhaps. All we have
done is define classes, identify the two main agents of their formation,
suggest that the relationship between them should be the focus of com-
parative analysis, and indicate the phenomena, and the kind of evidence,
that will enable us to identify classes: a recognition of some common inter-
ests, collective activities, associations, and institutions, habits and ways of
life that distinguish their members from others in their own society.
Everything else remains to be decided in the light of the available
evidence. We have said nothing about the number of classes that we might
expect to find in these societies, and have not suggested that they are sym-
metrical or together form a system, or made any of the standardizing, pro-
crustean assumptions common in comparative studies of social mobility,
such as the idea that everyone in a society must belong to one class or
another. We are ready, therefore, to recognize classes of varying shapes
and sizes, in various stages of formation, in differing states of vitality and
passivity, and with different bases of organization and solidarity.
In an exploratory study, drawing on secondary sources, it would be foolish
and counter-productive to impose overly stringent requirements before recog-
nizing a class. We will not, therefore, insist that a class should have organ-
ized all or even a majority of its potential members in the country, or that
its members should have united in a single national association, or that
they should participate equally in its collective institutions or demonstrate
a uniform lifestyle and culture, or subscribe to a common ideology. Out-
siders, with little direct personal experience of a particular class, commonly
tend to exaggerate their homogeneity, as Marx exaggerated that of ‘the pro-
letariat’, and Orwell that of the lower middle class.18 Those who have
studied classes most carefully, on whose evidence we will rely, have invari-
ably found all sorts of distinctions within them, co-existing with solidarity
against outsiders.19 We might reasonably expect therefore to find that classes
have an organized core and a larger, less organized periphery, less conscious of
their class membership. Since we will be tracking classes over time, we will
also be ready to find emergent, half-formed, fragmentary and even episodic
classes, and since the quality of the available evidence varies, we also expect
to find ambiguous cases, classes about which there is still room for doubt
and disagreement.
That said, however, there are limits on what we can accept as a class.
We can hardly recognize a class that has failed to create any distinctive
collective associations, or uphold any distinctive and enduring institutions,
that has never displayed any inter-occupational, inter-regional or inter-

generational solidarity, or a class whose supposed members have never
recognized themselves, or been recognized by other members of their own
society, as a class. It follows that many of the classes known only to their
authors, and identified and labelled them by some ‘objective’ criterion they
themselves consider important, or by some interest that they believe ought
to unite a class, will not be recognized as classes in this investigation, what-
ever their uses in various kinds of social, market or electoral analysis may
be. Wright drew a distinction between what he called ‘processual’ criteria
of class, meaning that classes are recognized ‘above all by the lived experi-
ences of people’ and seen as ‘an embodiment of the past in the present’,
and ‘structural’ criteria, meaning they are recognized by ‘the objective con-
ditions facing different actors’, and seen as ‘an embodiment of possible
futures in the present.’20 All of the former we can identify will figure in this
investigation, and none of the latter, since they have not been seen and heard
over time, and their ‘possible futures’ might well turn out to be figments of
their authors’ imagination. Classes are here, to repeat E.P. Thompson’s
words, ‘something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have
happened) in human relationships.’
Amongst those excluded therefore are the quintiles and deciles drawn
from analyses of the distributions of national wealth and income, and often
taken as class proxies, as well as the numerical classes, categories and divisions
invented by census bureaux, social scientists and market researchers for their
own purposes, including the seven classes originally defined by the Registrar-
General of the United Kingdom in 1911, as well as the somewhat similar
seven used in the Oxford Mobility Project, and later amended in the Com-
arative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations (Casmin). These
included a ‘service’ class, which was originally defined as ‘those exercising
power and expertise on behalf of corporate bodies plus such elements of the
classic bourgeoisie (independent businessmen and ‘free’ professionals) as are
not yet assimilated into this new formation.’21 Apart from failing to identify
any collective associations or institutions that have distinguished those ‘exer-
cising power and expertise on behalf of corporate bodies’ or any process of
assimilation, the main indicator of its collective existence was demographic,
meaning that ‘its members’, as they were called, ‘despite their diverse origins,
display a high degree of both intergenerational stability and worklife continu-
ity’, criteria that would allow a sociologist to create as many classes as he or
she cared to. The classes included in this investigation are, by contrast, distin-
guished by their members’ collective actions and institutions, by boundaries
they and others recognize, and by historical or contemporary records of their
collective actions. It seems improbable that any members of this supposed
service class, or anyone else, were aware that they belonged to it. When,
however, either the Registrar-General’s or Casmin’s seven classes are collapsed
into middle and working classes, they immediately become eligible, since
there is documentary evidence of a collective awareness and collective

institutions among both.
Lots of other classes, exciting as they often sound, are also left by the
wayside. Brooks, for instance, argued that, over the past two decades or
so, a class of ‘bobos’ had emerged in the United States, combining an old
bourgeois ethos with a bohemian spirit and an enthusiasm for equality,
fitness and environmentalism, but had no evidence as yet of their collec-
tive organization, sentiments or actions as a class.22 Florida’s ‘creative’ class,
consisting of all those who ‘create meaningful new forms’, will also be
excluded, as will his version of the ‘service’ class, consisting of those who
‘take care of the creative class and do their chores.’23 Zweig’s ‘secret’
American working class, which consists, of the 60% of the American labour
force who ‘have relatively little control over the pace and content of their
work’ is also, for the same reason, ignored.24 It is a class that Zweig virtually
admits does not actually exist, though he would very much like to sum-
mon it into existence. Many of its members refer to themselves as middle
class, and show no signs that they belong, or wish to belong to, an organ-
ized working class. Mount’s ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’ must also be excluded,
simply because he also provided no evidence of collective actions or insti-
tutions that define one or other or distinguish one from another.25 His
‘downers’ seem close to being an underclass, which one might add is also
ineligible, not because it does not exist, but because it is defined largely by
the absence of any kind of collective association, institution or identity.
Taking to heart one lesson from the earlier review of comparative ana-
lyses, we will compare England with just three other societies, Russia, France,
and the United States, which allows both author and reader a reasonable
chance of keeping track of historical events and institutional variations
that might make a difference to the way classes in these three societies have
been formed, defined or dissolved. Even though limited to this relatively
small number of cases, the ground to be covered is vast, and we can there-
fore examine only a sample of the available evidence. Hopefully it is a rea-
sonably representative one, since no effort has been made to select studies
from any particular point of view, only to find those that shed light on the
collective activities that have distinguished one class from another, or the
interests that have united them and explain their solidarity. As far as poss-
ible, the investigation focuses on the results of the research rather than its
methodology or sources. Initially, it sought to steer clear of the debates that
some of them have provoked, on the grounds that entering them, let alone
trying to resolve them, would scupper the investigation by making it inter-
minable. This proved to be a hopelessly naïve aspiration, and I have to opt
for one side or the other, often no doubt after insufficient evaluation of
their relative merits. No effort is made to generate new evidence, or report
the very latest research. Any discoveries, or shocks in the course of the investi-
gation therefore arise, not from the revelation of hitherto unknown data,
but simply from the juxtaposition and re-consideration of long-familiar,

and occasionally long-forgotten, evidence that comparison necessarily entails.
As befits an investigation which was provoked by Orwell, and resumes a
dialogue with Djilas, we will begin with the society which preoccupied them
both – Russia.
4
Class Formation in Two Russias
Russia is the extreme case of the use of political power to make or break
classes, but it is tsarist, not Soviet, Russia, that deserves first consideration,
since it provides a much longer-lasting and more durable example of
a state’s attempt to control and manage the stratification of its society,
a point that both Djilas and his critics overlooked. As it has turned out,
Soviet Russia’s efforts in this direction were relatively brief, and in any
case it is hardly possible to know what should be attributed to Soviet policy
in this respect without knowing something of the stratification that
preceded it.
The official classes of Imperial Russia
The basic criterion of social differentiation in Imperial Russia, the great

social divide which predated the Romanovs, was the form of state obliga-
tion, between those who rendered personal service to the tsar and were tax
exempt, the so-called muzhi or liudi, the big men, meaning the nobility,
military and civil officials, as well as the more prosperous merchants, versus
the little men, the muzhiki, the tiaglo-bearers, whose obligations were
defined collectively and who paid taxes in addition to their labour ser-
vices.1 The clergy did neither, but for most purposes belonged with the
muzhi.
Service created a distinctive frame of mind, what Raeff called ‘the basic
normative framework for individual and social relationships’ in Imperial
Russia.2 Any investigation of its classes must therefore begin by recognizing
this prior division between those who rendered personal service to the tsar,
held appointments in the imperial bureaucracy, and acted in his name, and
the rest of the population who were subject to them. Peter the Great
(1682–1725) laid the foundations of this bureaucracy, and it was to remain
a superior source of power, prestige and authority, and the pre-eminent
social reference point throughout the Imperial era. He arranged all military
and civil offices in a ‘Table of Ranks’, which differentiated the responsibilities
49
of 14 military and civil positions. All military ranks in the Table, and ini-
tially the top eight civil ranks, were hereditary noble ranks, though pres-
sure from the nobility later prompted it to be limited to the top five, and
later four, civil ranks.3
Over time, the legally-imposed and enforced rules of the Table of Ranks
came to be seen as very much more than specifying positions in a bureau-
cratic hierarchy. In Bennett’s words, they defined ‘norms of private accept-
ability’, and ‘as categories in which the world worked.’4 Active measures
were taken to ensure that these ‘norms’ were properly observed in daily life,
by appointing inspectors to mingle in polite society and identify ‘insolent
individuals’ who claimed a higher rank than that to which they were for-
mally entitled. Although there was no legal collective term for all those
who held an official rank or chin, they came in time to be colloquially
referred to as chinovniki, and became stock figures in Russian literature.
Outsiders therefore clearly recognized their collective identity, which prompts
one to wonder whether they might themselves be considered as a class.
They had, of course, a number of things in common. Their power and
status emanated from the same source, and they all acted in the name of
the tsar, and one may infer that they felt a common interest in the con-
tinuation of the regime and the existing social order. They all had lifetime
careers and, after Catherine the Great’s (1762–1796) rather casual decision,
could expect automatic promotion every seven years, and after Paul I
(1796–1801) every three years, though selection to the four most senior
ranks, the generalitet, required the personal approval of the tsar.5 Although
positions were not hereditary, selection procedures favoured the sons
of existing office-holders, and hence provided a means of occupational
inheritance.6 All officials had designated titles and forms of address. Ranks
nine to 14, for instance were all to be addressed as ‘your honour’ and their
precedence in ceremonial rituals and official dress were spelt out in the
Code of Laws. The Muscovite tradition of ‘feeding off’ the population,
which ‘gave the civil service free rein to exploit the country, as long as it
turned over its fixed share to the state’, continued informally even after the
creation of a salaried civil service in the mid-nineteenth century, especially
in the provinces. Noting the ways in which they converted the public
service into an instrument of personal gain, Pipes decided in disgust, they
‘were not “public servants” at all’. Personal gain, however, had a collective
dimension since they expected others to be similarly implicated in bribery,
‘instinctively ejected from their midst the overzealous and scrupulous’, and
developed strong bonds ‘of mutual responsibility’. Such bonds, regardless
of their purpose, may be considered a form of class solidarity.7 There were
few whistleblowers.
The notable missing element of a class is that they never formed a col-
lective association by which they might articulate their interests, but then
they had no more need of one than Djilas’s new class. The state apparatus
Class Formation in Two Russias 51
served as such. Wallace described chinovniki as ‘a peculiar kind of class’.8

Raeff also thought Russian officials ‘constituted a class’ rather than ‘a gen-
uine bureaucracy’ since there was no ‘common legal language … between
society and state.’9 Pipes described them as ‘a closed order’, with a ‘distinct
tendency to form a closed, hereditary caste’, associating ‘only with their
own kind, fawning on superiors and bullying inferiors.’10
One only hesitates to follow these authoritative sources because
chinovniki were also divided in various ways, first by the ministry to which
they were attached since each minister was individually responsible to the
tsar, and only towards the end of the regime was there a prime minister
or cabinet and any form of collective responsibility as a government.11
There was also an ‘almost unbridgeable gap’ between those who worked in
St. Petersburg, and the other less educated four-fifths who worked in the
89 provincial administrations, leading one to doubt whether they ‘found it
easy to interact with one another’ as members of the same class.12 Most
importantly, there was a profound vertical cleavage in status and culture at
the top of the Table of Ranks between the career officials, the bureaucrats,
or pure chinovniki who had acquired nobility as a result of their promotion,
and those who were born into it, and entered imperial service with a
title, family estates and serfs. The latter tended to enter at a higher level than
promoted commoners, either because they had attended schools reserved for
nobility, or because they had risen through many ranks during their prior
military service. They also seem to have enjoyed decided advantages in pro-
motion to the highest ranks in the capital.13 Pipes referred to ‘a growing
gulf’ between the two categories of dvoriane in the eighteenth century, and
later to ‘two constituent elements of the service class’, perceptively noting
that those born into the nobility were commonly referred to as dvoriany
and never as chinovniki.14 Pintner’s evidence showed that in the mid-
nineteenth century, there was still ‘no significant economic or social blend-
ing at the top’, meaning that career bureaucrats made no effort to emulate
the land-owning nobility by acquiring estates and serfs, and there was little
inter-marriage between the two elements.15 Even though we have accepted
that classes may be internally differentiated, this division, as well as the
departmental and capital/provincial fissures, raises the question whether
the service nobility as a whole, ennobled bureaucrats as well as land-
owning hereditary nobility, had sufficient common interest and solidarity to
form a single class.
Perhaps we may best return to this question after considering the latter,
the dvorianstvo, the hereditary landed nobility, as a class in its own right.
All observers agree that it differed greatly from the land-holding aristocra-
cies of Western Europe, whose members often bore the name of the place
from which their family had sprung, and had ancestral claims not only to
their land, but also to the loyalty of their retainers and dependants as well
as that of the communities amongst whom they resided. Wallace, who
lived in Russia between 1870 and 1875, and came to know many members
of the Russian nobility, put a common view. It differed, he said, from those
of Western Europe in that ‘it was formed out of more heterogeneous
materials, and these materials did not spontaneously combine to form an
organic whole, but were crushed into a conglomerate mass by the weight of
autocratic power. It never became a semi-independent factor in the State.
What rights and privileges it possesses it received from the Monarchy … it
has no hoary traditions or deep-rooted prejudices … has little or nothing of
what we call aristocratic feeling. Hence there is a certain amount of truth in
the oft-repeated saying that there is in reality no aristocracy in Russia.’16
Peter had intended that the property and honour of the nobility should
derive exclusively from their continued service to him and their rank in his
service. He therefore continued with methods that his predecessors had
used to prevent the nobility acquiring and exercising any independent
political or governmental power.17 As a deliberate act of policy, nobles’
property was scattered around the country, and they therefore lacked per-
manent ties with, or responsibilities for, any particular region. They were
often required to exchange land and serfs they had been granted in one
region for those in another. They were never appointed to serve in their
‘home’ territories, and constantly rotated from one region to another.18 The
economic foundations of a powerful landed class were still further weak-
ened by the nobles themselves, who insisted that their property, along with
their titles, be inherited by all their male heirs. It was therefore sub-divided
every generation.19 As a result, the Russian nobility was both extremely
large and highly differentiated internally. Vast differences in wealth and
lifestyle separated those with the ear of the tsar at the top of the Table of
Ranks from those living in the profoundest poverty and ignorance along-
side peasants in the countryside.20
Blum was in little doubt that Peter had succeeded in welding the servitor
nobles into a single class so that ‘despite their internal stratification a sense
of unity and cohesiveness grew among all levels … from the reign of Peter
on.’ By the mid-eighteenth century, he observed, ‘nobles forthrightly
identified themselves as belonging to a corporate body all of whose mem-
bers shared the same interest and ambitions.’21 Blum, however, was not
concerned to disentangle the ‘interest and ambitions’ they might share
simply as members of a land-owning nobility from those that they might
have acquired as officials, and therefore share with ennobled bureaucrats.
Moreover, the eighteenth century was the high point in the corporate
autonomy of servitor land-owning nobles, the reign of Catherine the Great
(1762–1796) often being described as their ‘the golden age’.
In 1736 Anne (1730–1740) had reduced their service requirement from
life to 25 years, and one son was permanently excused from service if he
managed the family property. During his short reign, Peter III (1761–1762)
abolished the service requirement completely, and nobles were then free to
decide whether they wanted to serve or not. Although some decided to serve
only for a limited period, there was no mass exodus from service back to their
estates to build ties with local communities.22 By then, it seems, the idea that
status derived primarily from state service was too well-entrenched. Catherine
made many concessions to them no doubt because, as both a usurper and
a foreigner, she felt in need of their support. In 1785 she promulgated
the Dvorianstvo Charter. Besides leaving them with absolute powers over
their serfs, this confirmed their freedom from compulsory state service and
taxes, exempted them from corporal punishment, precisely defined the
offences for which they could be deprived of their rank, and confirmed
their full title to their land and its mineral resources, which they were
allowed to exploit by establishing manufacturing and trading enterprises
as they wished. She also granted them certain broad powers of local
government through triennial assemblies of nobles established in every
province.23
All these things were, however, by her gift, bestowed rather than won, as
her son and successor Paul I (1796–1801) demonstrated by reversing them
almost overnight, apparently to spite his dead mother.24 A small group of
nobles then retaliated by assassinating him. Another group of nobles, the
so-called Decembrists, later sought to assassinate Nicholas I (1825–1855) on
the first day of his reign. Plots, however, are not much of a contribution to,
or substitute for, the continuous use of corporate institutions to normalize
the rights and privileges of a class. Of this, there was very little sign. Nobles
appear to have seen their assemblies either as another kind of state service,
or as social gatherings, rather than as a means of mobilizing and exerting
sustained collective pressure on the tsar as a class of hereditary land-owning
nobles – at least until the twilight of the regime.25 They never, therefore,
converted them into parliamentary bodies, and they were not in any sense
precursors of the later state dumas. Indeed, they only sprang to life at the
end of the regime when a section of the nobility organized to oppose the
state dumas.26 Pipes thought that all along the nobility were less interested
in exercising political power as members of a corporate body than in their
economic privileges and social status, and these depended primarily on
their relationship with the tsar and the state, rather than on their member-
ship of the nobility. Their serfs recognized the difference. ‘Serfs paid great
attention to rank of their master’, Raeff observed. ‘They spoke reverently of
“the general”, and never spoke of the “nobleman” with the same feeling of
reverence and awe.’ They had ‘no respect for a noble without rank’, and
even ‘snubbed masters with lower rank than that of their own.’27
After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, a process of dispersal or
decomposition among the noble estate commenced, and continued to the
very end of the regime.28 The ‘broad easy road on which the proprietors
had hitherto let themselves be borne along’, as Wallace put it, ‘suddenly
split into a number of narrow, arduous, thorny paths.’29 A minority
converted themselves into commercial farmers, often with the help of

mortgages on their remaining property. Some sought to live on their not
very reliable redemption payments, perhaps as investors in government
bonds or industrial stocks. Some became entrepreneurs, businessmen and
professionals, and then identified themselves as members of the intelli-
gentsia rather than the nobility.30 One imagines that Wallace met a dis-
proportionate number of these, since few of the nobility he spoke to ‘were
thinking about the rights and privileges of their class’ and were more
interested in ‘the political liberty of the people as a whole.’31
Manning focused on the dwindling segment of the provincial land-
owning gentry who devoted themselves to their estates and to local public
affairs, and who made use of the privileged position on the governing
boards of the zemstva, the institutions of local government created as one
of the great reforms in 1864. At first, zemstva had been the centre of gentry
opposition to the regime and of demands for representative institutions. A
number of gentry leaders, allied with ‘the third element’, the technically
qualified employees of the zemstva, had even sought, both officially and
unofficially, to enlist peasant support, and to do so had been quite willing
to pay the price by agreeing to expropriation of their own land – albeit
under certain conditions and with compensation. However, the peasant
unrest following the urban revolution of 1905 changed everything. Since
the angry peasants made little distinction between those who sympathized
with their plight and those who did not, and were, if anything, more
hostile to those who had sought to modernize their estates, many of the
gentry fled the countryside, and joined in panic sales of land. The rump
who remained ejected their progressive leaders and set about curbing ‘the
third element’, whom they held responsible for stirring up the peasant
unrest. After the election of the First State Duma in 1906, a majority of
whose members were peasants, they became still more conscious of the
threat to their way of life, and then organized nationally to resist any kind
of expropriation of their land, any extension of the zemstva franchise, or
any further advance towards constitutional or representative government.
They became in fact resolute defenders of the autocratic powers of the tsar,
against both elected dumas and the reform initiatives of the officials of the
imperial bureaucracy.
Their national organization rested on frequent congresses of representa-
tives of the governing boards of the zemstva, on the resuscitation of the
long-somnolent noble assemblies and the formation, in 1906, of a modern-
looking political association, the United Nobility. This was far from being
representative of the nobility as a whole.32 Over the next few years, how-
ever, it proved to be an effective pressure group, and could rely on support
from the local marshals of the nobility whom the provincial nobles elected,
from the appointed State Council – one quarter of whom joined the United
Nobility, and which, on the creation of the state dumas, became the upper
house of the legislature – and from relatives, sympathetic officials and

courtiers with the ear of the tsar. In sum, this tiny and most traditional
fragment of the nobility, whose way of life seemed about to disappear,
suddenly developed an extremely high degree of class consciousness
and solidarity, and near-total agreement on their class interests. They dis-
tinguished themselves as independent country gentlemen from other mem-
bers of the nobility who served as state officials, from those who had
acquired professional qualifications and identified with the intelligentsia,
and of course from those who participated as merchants and entrepreneurs
in the rapidly emerging urban industrial economy. Over the last years of
the regime they bested them all, most critically in the two years 1906–1907,
when they blocked or amended beyond recognition virtually all of the
reforms proposed by Stolypin. In so doing, they sealed the fate of the regime.
By birth and upbringing, Stolypin himself belonged to this newly-
emergent class of provincial landed nobility, but his career made him one of
those who, as Orlovsky put it, saw themselves ‘more and more as bureaucrats,
as servants of the state … rather than members of their hereditary legal
estate.’33 Towards the end of the regime, it was in fact increasingly difficult
to distinguish those within the administration who had inherited their
titles from the military service of their forbears in earlier generations from
the landless sons of the preceding generations of ennobled chinovniki.34
Although the hereditary landed nobility continued to be over-represented
in higher positions until the very end, it is clear that their lineage and land
counted for less. Orlovsky’s sample of 87 of the elite officials of the
Ministry of Interior between 1855 and 1881 showed that 61% of them were
landless, and the hereditary landed nobility amongst them appear to have
earned their position more because of the exclusive schools they had attended
than because of their birth.35 Despite the seniority rules, and despite their
superiors’ prejudices, as well as those of the tsar, the service had become
accustomed to promotion on merit, and commoners were certainly able to
reach the very highest positions.36 Moreover the proportion of ex-military
hereditary nobles in the service had also been declining right through the
nineteenth century, and along with them, one imagines, the attitudes that
had maintained the cultural divide between the two ‘constituent elements’
of the service in the past.37 Orlovsky’s evidence from the Ministry of the
Interior also suggested that career advancement frequently involved mobility
between ministries, as well as between central and provincial departments,
and though officials in the latter were still less educated and less well-paid
than those in the capital, one may infer that they too were coming to see
themselves as career officials dependent for both their income and their
status on their rank within the service.38 Nobles who still considered them-
selves primarily as landowners might seek refuge in a number of remaining
‘gentlemen’s enclaves’ within the administration, but it seems reason-
able to conclude that by the end of the century a single service class was
emerging within the imperial administration around the values and shared
interests of professional bureaucrats.39
Thus, although the hereditary landed nobility could not be said to have
formed a single class, it had contributed to the emergence of two other
classes: one mobilized to defend their remaining privileges, and the other
owing more to their ancient obligation of personal service to the tsar. We
will consider its contribution to yet a third, the intelligentsia, in a moment,
after considering whether either of the other two officially-designated cate-
gories of the population, urban merchants and peasants, might be said to
have formed classes.
Elsewhere in Europe, urban merchants had emerged under the protection
of the state, and had then often gone on to establish their corporate insti-
tutions and established a considerable degree of independence from it. No
such sequence of development occurred in Imperial Russia. Russian mer-
chants never had the opportunity to create their own towns, or develop
their own institutions within them. Towns had emerged more as military-
administrative outposts than as market centres. In the sixteenth century,
the Grand Princes of Muscovy had confined merchants to specific quarters
of them, called posady, from which they were to conduct their business.
They were tied to their posady, much as serfs were tied to the land, and
like a rural community they bore collective responsibility for the fulfilment
of their hereditary tiaglo obligations, which were, if anything, still more
onerous than those of serfs. These obligations and the restraints on their
freedom might have been expected to prompt merchants to coalesce as a
group or a class, but apart from the disturbances in several posady in 1648,
they never demonstrated any spontaneous collective consciousness or
action. Their economic opportunities were in fact limited, since princes,
and later tsars, claimed ownership over basic raw materials like timber and
coal, declared monopolies in certain traded products, such as salt, alcohol
and potash, and were themselves proprietors of the early metalworking and
textile factories. Others were farmed out and run by merchants and busi-
nessmen drafted for the purpose, much against their will, for despite the
honour seemingly bestowed on them, they realized that they would have
to give priority to the tsar’s business at the expense of their own.40
Peter had reduced the number of royal monopolies, and sought to
encourage private enterprise and the emergence of an indigenous bour-
geoisie by creating two classes of trading corporations or merchant guilds,
similar as he thought to those he had observed in Western Europe. How-
ever, he continued to control industrial activity by means of licences and
concessions: those supplying armaments, clothing and supplies to the
military, being obliged to accept the condition that if any of their products
were found unsatisfactory their enterprise reverted, in its entirety, to the
state. Manufacturing and mining enterprises were still launched by drafting
merchants to run them, along with the serfs who were to work in them.41
Catherine, who similarly hoped to encourage an indigenous bourgeoisie,

added a third class of guild, and she went still further in reducing direct state
ownership and management of economic activity. In 1762, anyone was free
to start manufacturing establishments wherever they wanted, except for envi-
ronmental reasons, in Moscow and St. Petersburg.42 However, since there were
no laws or courts to define and uphold the rights of private property, and the
guilds gave no sign of mobilizing to defend them, the distinction between
public and private ownership meant little. Her officials retained ample means
of intervening arbitrarily in any private economic activity.
Members of the merchant guilds were privileged in certain ways. Mem-
bers of the first two were exempt from military service, though not from
the obligation to quarter troops. All three were exempt from the despised
soul tax, though not as tax-free as the nobility and clergy, being taxed
as corporate bodies. In that respect, they were no different from guilds
in Western Europe, but unlike them, Russia’s guilds were not granted a
monopoly or any protected jurisdiction in return for their taxes. Russian
merchants always had to compete, therefore, with any dvoriane or clergy-
men who had a mind to take up their line of business, and indeed with any
serfs who had been given freedom to start a business by their masters.43
Moreover, merchants proved no more capable than the nobility of convert-
ing the corporate institutions that had been granted them into a means of
defending their collective interests and extending their rights. In practice,
therefore, their guilds were simply a means of registering, controlling and
taxing merchants, of forcing them to accept various administrative and
fiscal obligations, not a means of freeing them from the supervision of the
imperial bureaucracy.44
The history of Russian financial institutions illustrates their inability to
convert hereditary obligations into collective solidarity. The first commer-
cial exchange, established in St. Petersburg in 1703, was not the result
of their initiative, but was imposed on them by Peter. Though given self-
governing powers similar to those of the London and Amsterdam
exchanges that he had observed, Peter ‘soon tired’, Rieber tells us, ‘of
the sluggish and unsystematic response of his merchants’, and made the
exchange responsible to the imperial bureaucracy. Over the next century,
the government sought to ‘instil a sense of order, regularity and respon-
sibility into the activities of the merchants dealing on the exchange’, period-
ically passing laws against ‘fighting, spreading unfounded rumours, engaging
in political discussions and trading in paper securities.’45 Merchants only
started to create their own exchanges in the 1830s and 1840s, but those
in both Moscow and Rybinsk, had difficulty in persuading members to
abandon their traditional private methods of dealing, and make use of the
services of brokers.
Lacking corporate institutions that elicited their loyalties and generated
any sense of corporate pride and honour, merchants came to be, like the
nobility, dispersed over the entire social hierarchy, a few being the equals
of the noblest servitors, while many were indistinguishable from trading
peasants.46 The richest never became spokesmen for the rest, or enlisted the
support of their assistants, clerks, and suppliers in any larger urban class
formation or interest group. They did not provide any shelter for artisans
whose products they sold, or serve as a model of civic independence for the
artisan corporations that Peter had created alongside those of merchants.47
Entrepreneurs had no particular sympathy or ties with urban merchants,
and no incentive to accept the obligations that membership of their guilds
entailed. They tended therefore to avoid urban communities altogether,
and to retain their original identity and legal status, whatever that might
be, noble, priest or serf.48 Entrepreneurs were therefore outsiders, drawn
from all classes, rather than being members of some new bourgeois or
urban class formation, or a class of their own. Moreover, in the period of
rapid industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century when they
began to appear in some numbers, a high proportion of those creating
large-scale enterprises were foreigners, who could not be readily fitted into
any indigenous collective institution or prestige ranking.
Rieber reckoned that merchants were the most passive and submissive
soslovie or estate, of the entire empire, and described them as lying ‘between
opportunity and bondage’ with ‘one foot on the Table of Ranks and the
other stuck fast in the legal and fiscal obligations of the urban community.’
Over the hundred years preceding the Crimean War, he recorded only one
instance, in St. Petersburg in 1754, of ‘outright resistance … to official state
policy’.49 Nor could later Russian merchants be said to have been ‘emer-
ging’, ‘rising’, or ‘ascending’, as the bourgeoisies in the rest of Europe are
commonly said to have been. If anything, Rieber thought, were declining
during Russia’s period of industrialization at the turn of the century.
Together, industrialists and merchants constituted 5.6% of the membership
of the first duma of 1906, and some of them tried, but failed, to form their
own party. McKean traced the activities of the St. Petersburg Society of Mill
and Factory Owners, the most important of the several employers’ associ-
ations in the city. It did not, however, represent a cross-section of firms in
the capital and was dominated ‘by a very small group of about eleven indi-
viduals’, almost all of whom were ‘of Swedish, German and French extrac-
tion.’50 After the failure of its attempts to secure representation in the First
State Duma in 1906, the Society ‘divided on many issues’ and since it was
later in a state of ‘near permanent dissension’, could hardly have been an
effective instrument of class interest and pressure.51 When the Provisional
Government assumed power in February 1917, manufacturers still had not
organized as a class, or combined to defend their interests.52
Hence, we may conclude that while merchants, like the landed nobility
as a whole, had formal legal characteristics and corporate institutions that
might have defined them as a class, they did not respond to these initial
cues from the state to communicate and collaborate with their peers, to
define their common interests, or to assert their own collective identity and
status independently of the state. The relationship they individually estab-
lished with state officials was evidently more important to them than the
relationships they established with other merchants. The merchant guilds
were state rather than class institutions. A bourgeoisie that could not even
come together either to celebrate what was supposedly its own revolution
in February 1917, or to resist a second, a few months later, that threatened
its demise, hardly deserves recognition as a class.
The corporate institutions of the peasants, the commune or mir, were by
contrast with both the noble assemblies and merchant guilds of consider-
ably greater effectiveness, and have attracted more attention both from his-
torians and other social commentators. They were once thought to have
expressed timeless moral values, to have been the foundation of a dis-
tinctive communal and egalitarian way of life which embodied Russia’s
true spirit, for though their members held their houses and garden plots as
individuals, they were organized around the periodic repartition of strips of
the commune’s arable land. The number of strips each household received
was determined by its needs and resources, and took account of the lie and
fertility of the soil as well as its distance from the village. To ensure that the
land was divided fairly, the allocation of strips to particular households was
usually decided by lot.53 The commune as a whole remained responsible for
the aged, infirm and orphaned and other dependent and unattached
persons who could not fend for themselves. Observers could therefore see
in the commune a spontaneous, miniature form of democracy, even of
socialism and the welfare state.
Research has not been kind to such legends. Serfdom had been reinvented
in Russia in the late sixteenth century, and was thereafter strengthened and
extended just when it was disappearing elsewhere in Europe, to prevent
excessive migration from the forest-heartlands of central Russia to the
fertile, newly-conquered black lands in the south and east.54 Communes
were not therefore natural communities, or the product of a spontaneous
co-operative sentiment of the peasants, but administrative units, of one or
more villages, or half of a large village, for the collection of taxes and the
recruitment of soldiers. Officials and landowners therefore had as much
interest as serfs in maintaining the villages’ communal institutions and
in repartitioning the land fairly, for no family could then avoid paying
their rent or labour to their owner, or their taxes, or supplying their sons to
the army. Serfs supported them for the same reason: to ensure that these
crushing burdens were equally shared.
Moreover, the autonomy of the mir was checked in a number of ways.55
Although communes enjoyed a considerable measure of self-government in
their domestic affairs – resolving disputes, punishing minor crimes, provid-
ing passports for those who wished to work in the cities, and distributing
communal funds to the sick and aged – state officials and proprietors could
override their decisions, replace their starotsa or elected officials, command
a repartition, and even disband the commune.56 Nor were the communes
quite as egalitarian as many outside observers imagined. Older male peas-
ants were often able to act in concert with state and seigniorial officials to
dominate and exploit the majority. Peasants’ extended families were them-
selves patriarchal and authoritarian, and embodied ‘a system of day-to-day
subjugation’, as Moon put it, ‘that replicated the oppression of all Russia’s
peasants by the ruling and landholding elites.’57 Moreover, whenever the
peasants went into trade and handicraft production, a considerable degree
of economic differentiation often emerged within the commune.58
After their emancipation in 1861, peasants remained quite separate from
the rest of the population in a kind of transitional regime, as if not yet
ready for full citizenship. And though they were formally free to move, to
own property, to sue in the ordinary courts, their communes remained col-
lectively responsible for the redemption payments to their former masters,
and members were required to obtain permission from the commune if
they wished to absent themselves for any length of time. In reality, there-
fore, the commune retained its authority over its members, perhaps even
increased it.59 Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, state
supervision of their affairs also increased. ‘Land commandants’, chosen
by the bureaucracy, were given extensive powers over their villages. Even
after redemption payments were finally abolished in 1906, the commune
stubbornly clung to its authority over its members, and strongly resisted
the attempts to create a free market in farming land, and a new class of
yeoman-farmers.60
Many of the features of peasant life mentioned, both before and after
emancipation, might appear to have provided almost ideal conditions for
the formation of a class. Although there were considerable variations by
region and by type of proprietor, all peasants were similarly oppressed and
exploited. All lived permanently under the threat of arbitrary intervention
in their lives from tax and army recruitment officials, proprietors and their
bailiffs. All were to some degree self-governing, and all were clearly demar-
cated from the rest of the population, by their work, their communal insti-
tutions, their family structures, festivities and culture, as well as by law.
They also shared certain ideas about themselves, and the world in which
they lived, which might perhaps have been ingredients of a class ideology
such as their notion that evil nobles surrounded and perverted the wishes
of the ‘good’ tsar, or their claim ‘while we belong to our lords, the land
belongs to us’, and their dream that one day there would be a great ‘black’
repartition when all the land, including forests and pasture land, would be
returned to them.
And yet, despite all these apparently favourable, long-standing pre-
conditions, their potential as a class only began to be realized at the very
end of the regime. The mir was an inward-looking, isolated, deeply con-
servative little world, centred on peasants’ loyalty to their extended family
and to their own commune. Being largely illiterate, at least until the final
decades of the regime, and lacking adequate roads or means of transport-
ation, one commune was unable to communicate routinely with others, or
with the rest of Russian society, and they seem to have had little sense of
belonging to it. Their courts never accumulated precedents or any common
law.61 And their assemblies did not provide much useful experience of self-
government, since they never developed or accepted rules of debate or pro-
cedure. They usually voted by acclamation, seldom challenged the rule
of their elders, and the only literate or semi-literate person within them,
their clerks, kept few records and accounts. They were, Pipes observed,
more like meetings in nomadic encampments than the settled institutions
of an English or Japanese village.62 Since they had no standing committees
or permanent executive officers, they were unable to collaborate routinely
with one another, or form alliances and federations.63
Kimball focused on one village institution that was at the centre of its
communal life, the kabak or village pub.64 It was usually, he observed, ‘the
most prominent enclosed public space in the village, after the church’ and
therefore utilized for the village assembly, court sessions and bazaars. It
served variously as a social club and meeting place, as a dealing and trading
forum, and as a centre of communication with the outside world, often by
public readings of newspapers. He suggested kabaki were peasant versions
of the kruzhki or voluntary societies of intellectuals, and of the ‘angliiskii
klubi’ found in the imperial capitals, and plausibly argued that they should
be seen as ‘one facet of civil society in the early stages of formation’.
However, the only inter-village movement that they appear to have pro-
voked was the ‘empire-wide temperance movement’, a typically Russian
misnomer one must say, since this ‘temperance movement’ was in reality
a protest by ‘the drinking public’ against the reform of the alcohol excise
tax system which sharply increased the price of vodka. While the kabak
may well have been ‘the location of conversations on the most important
questions of peasant life’, these do not seem to have included many con-
versations about their common plight or their common class interests.65
Small-scale peasant disturbances, usually focusing on a local grievance or
a particular proprietor, bailiff or official, were very common, but any kind
of class action by peasants was extremely rare. They seem to have preferred
the individual ‘weapons of the weak’, flight, stealing, dissembling, feigning
illness or ignorance, working as little as possible, concealing land and
resources – rather than collective revolt. ‘One of the most striking features
of the history of peasant protest’, Moon thought, ‘is not not how much
active resistance there was, but how little.’66 Their four main revolts were
all led by Cossacks, who had a quite different pastoral or nomadic way
of life, and they drew disproportionately on peasants working in atypical
settings, such as mines, factories and foundries, and on non-Russians in the

borderlands where serfdom, and the restraints of communal life, were rela-
tively new or less oppressive.67 Even the large-scale protests of 1905–1907
and 1917–1921 owed much to external support, being responses to urban
unrest rather than spontaneous peasant-organized movements.68
In reality, therefore, the obstacles to class formation outweighed the
favourable factors, as young radical intellectuals, the narodnoki, discovered
in the mid-1870s when they fanned out from the cities to tell peasants of
the exploitation and oppression from which suffered, and to urge them to
protest as a class against it. They were frequently greeted with indifference
or as unwelcome intruders, and turned over to the authorities, or thought
to be witches and sometimes burnt. One political party developed out of
the narodniki and other revolutionary groups at the turn of the century, the
Socialist-Revolutionaries. It accepted the legend of the commune as an
indigenous form of socialism, thought that peasants rather than workers
would lead the revolution, and therefore made the peasants’ dream of a
‘black repartition’ the central plank of its programme. Although it was sup-
ported by peasants in elections for the First State Duma, and again in elec-
tions for the Constituent Assembly in 1918, its leaders and activists were all
intellectuals and students, not peasants.69 It was, in any case, more of an
underground terrorist organization than a mass or class movement.
Until the final years of the regime, it is therefore difficult to discover
any actions, institutions or spontaneous collective solidarity that would
allow one to describe peasants as a class. Like the land-owning nobility as
a whole and merchants, they were merely an official legal category, and
failed to articulate or defend their collective interests. They only began to
do so after the revolution in 1905, or more specifically after the Election
Law of December 11, 1905, for though there had been ‘some pooling of
effort’ between villages in their protests during the revolution, the ‘typical
disturbance’, Manning observed, ‘rarely involved more than one village’,
and ‘conflicts between villages were at least as common as co-operation
between them.’70 The Election Law of December 11, 1905 was significant
because for the first time it offered peasants the opportunity of parti-
cipating in the political life of the nation, and they then suddenly demon-
strated a remarkable capacity to organize election meetings, usually
without local officials’ consent, to nominate their candidates and to bring
out the vote on a ‘massive’ scale. These efforts seem to have owed much
more to their own ‘village intelligentsias’ of teachers and paramedics of the
zemstva and to those who had been employed in the cities or seen service
in the army than to the activities of revolutionary parties. Peasants consti-
tuted just over half of all voters (51%) throughout the Empire, and with the
help of indirect electoral procedures intended to severely under-represent
urban voters, 45.5% of the 508 deputies in the First State Duma were also
peasants.71 As long as it continued, peasant communities maintained a
continuous interest in its proceedings – public readings of newspapers in

the kabak being particularly important in this respect. Many villages passed
resolutions and petitions to support their representatives, and sent dele-
gations to St. Petersburg to make sure they were not diverted from their
main concern, their fundamental class interest, the redistribution of land.
This First State Duma lasted only 72 days, and due largely to the efforts
of the provincial land-owning gentry, who, as we have seen, were simul-
taneously mobilizing as a class, its three successors had substantially less
peasant participation. They were, however, sufficient to demonstrate
the first stage of the formation of a class of peasants with an aware-
ness of common interests and the rudiments of a national association
via the duma. A Peasants’ Union was formed, which claimed it had 200,000
members and clearly intended to organize across Russia, but it was sub-
sequently suppressed. It only resumed its public activities in 1917 when it
convened a national congress, rejected the Bolshevik coup, and seemed set
to define its class interests independently of the new regime until the
Bolsheviks also decided that, like the imperial regime, they did not want an
independent organization of peasants, and suppressed it by converting it
into a Soviet organization.72
We may therefore add a third emergent class, that of peasants, to the
rapidly-mobilized provincial gentry and the coalescing service class already
described. Earlier political events had also helped to form two other classes:
the intelligentsia, which began to emerge in the second and third decades of
the nineteenth century, and the working class which emerged at the end
of the nineteenth, but only assumed a class character in the early years of
the twentieth, in particular during the First World War.
And the unofficial ones formed in civil society
Raeff traced the origins of the intelligentsia from the decision of Peter the
Great, which compelled the nobility to acquire an education if they wished
to be legally recognized as an adult, to be able to marry, or to become an
officer, and to advance in the service of the state. Previously, most children
of the nobility had been cared for by their mothers, who were often igno-
rant and illiterate, and by serfs who indulged their every whim. If they
attended a local school, they received privileged treatment. Serf classmates
were, for instance, often punished for their transgressions. They were,
in short, brought up without discipline, without paternal supervision, and
without peers. When reorganizing the service nobility, however, Peter decided
that prior to entering service at the age of 15, the sons of the nobility
should be better educated than in the past, and that they should be obliged
to attend special military or technical boarding schools. Such schools
subsequently began to appear under military, ecclesiastical or university
auspices, and sometimes by private initiative.73 Sons destined for state
service then had to make a traumatic break from their families between the
ages of six and eight, and were isolated for some years both from their
families and the rest of society. Most schools, even the private and eccle-
siastical ones, were organized on military lines. Advancing a class was
described as advancing in rank, and the teaching staff were often addressed
by military titles. Obligations to the state were therefore instilled from a
very early age. Schooling became in practice the beginning of state service.
To go to school was to be ‘in service’.74
As a result of this shared experience, pupils often developed close attach-
ments, and a strong sense of solidarity with their peers, who were similarly
alienated from their elders, their homes and the society around them, and
alongside whom they had first been introduced to Western ideas and dis-
covered a new world of the spirit. When they left school, however, they
usually found it difficult to apply anything they had learned, and many of
them were therefore quickly disaffected from the state they were supposed
to serve. Instead, Raeff suggests, their sense of service was redirected
towards the Russian people at large, and many of them became determined
to use their knowledge to shape a new Russia, even a new humanity.75
Raeff argued that this common experience was the foundation of the
intelligentsia which began to emerge in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, roughly
coinciding with the emergence of the great age of Russian literature. Over
the following decades, their members adopted and became known by, their
collective name, and increasingly began to look and behave like a class.76
While its members were initially drawn almost exclusively from the gentry
and nobility, over time, and especially after Alexander II’s reforms, land-
owners, former military officers, doctors, professors, teachers and students,
public officials, especially in the zemstva, also began to identify themselves
as members of the intelligentsia, and passed on their membership to their
sons and grandsons. They created their own distinctive collective insti-
tutions: discussion circles, at first in the country houses of the nobility;
then in urban salons and the offices of so-called ‘thick’ or ‘fat’ journals, as
well as bookshops and voluntary societies; later by organizing conferences,
political parties and unions.77 They also of course had close and continuous
affiliations with universities, until the repression following the assassina-
tion of Alexander II in 1883, which resumed when the repression was lifted
in 1906.78 On many occasions members of the intelligentsia demonstrated
their willingness to organize and participate in collective action. Indeed, it
was their organized protests, rather than those of trade unions, which led
the assault on the regime in 1917.79 The only reason one might wish to
question their credentials as a class was that they not infrequently organ-
ized against each other. However, there were many occasions when their
shared alienation from the regime brought a broad spectrum of intellectual
opinion together under national umbrella organizations, such as the Union
of Liberation formed in 1903, and Union of Unions of 1905, and demon-
strated, for a while at least, their solidarity as a class.80 It was probably this
class solidarity, more than anything else, that persuaded many members of
the intelligentsia to hold their fire against the Bolsheviks even when they
profoundly disagreed with them.81
Although no class was destined to have a more momentous impact on
the destiny of Russia, it is not easy to define or explain its membership.
Malia observed that ‘No recognized system of social analysis, either those
known to the intelligentsia itself, or those elaborated since by modern
sociology, makes provision for a class held together only by the bond of
“consciousness”, “critical thought”, or moral passion.’ Most writers on the
subject have therefore thought, Malia continued, ‘that the intelligentsia
must be founded on something other than ideology alone, and have sug-
gested that they were ‘conscience-stricken noblemen’, or raznochchintsy,
people of no estate in particular.’ He found little evidence to support these
speculations. Quite a number of members of the intelligentsia, he pointed
out, ‘were successful and “integrated” professors, doctors and lawyers.’
They came ‘from all estates in general and no estate in particular. Its mem-
bers were not defined by the Table of Ranks, by their degrees, nor by any
other kind of indirect state recognition. Uncomfortable as it may be for
those who wish to find a material interest behind every class, it was wholly
self-defined.’82
Malia therefore described the intelligentsia as ‘a supra-class body’, since it
was the absence of any kind of common material interest that helps to
explain its distinctive character. Intellectuals were, in his words, ‘unfettered
in their extremism by the concrete interests of anyone with a potential
stake in the existing order’, and they ‘obtained a leverage against official
society from ever-present possibility of exploiting the elemental destruc-
tiveness of the desperate masses.’83 Their collective identity also seems to
have depended on the relative scarcity of other organized interests in civil
society, for it allowed their members to feel they had the duty to speak and
act in the name of a mute people.
Only one profession was permanently organized as a self-governing
body – advocates. Initially, their colleges were not spontaneous creations of
civil society, since they owed their existence to the Judicial Statute of 1864,
which had legally defined their attributes and powers. Unlike the nobility
and merchants, however, advocates quickly converted their corporate insti-
tutions into authentic self-governing bodies. Their colleges promulgated
and enforced their own rules, and created amongst advocates in many
cities a genuine sense of corporate honour and pride, which they jealously
defended against any kind of state intervention.84 Other professions also
began to organize after the turn of the century. Galai identified 14 ‘intel-
ligentsia unions’ formed between 1904–1905, including those of agro-
nomists, veterinary surgeons, engineers, technicians, medical and academic
personnel, government, municipal and zemstva employees, but could give
little information about their membership or duration.85 It seems certain,

however, that they found it impossible to follow advocates’ example, prin-
cipally because in varying ways, they were dependent on, and integrated
with the state. Physicians, for instance, were sharply divided between the
salaried employees of the zemsvta and the fee-for-service private practition-
ers in the major cities, and they were also, unlike advocates, incorporated
into the Table of Ranks.86 Advocates did not therefore prove to be the
pioneers of a succession of self-governing professions which might have
provided an alternative basis of middle class organization. The intelligentsia
therefore continued to flourish by drawing on members of diverse
professions.
In the final years of the regime, it was joined by another organized interest
in civil society: trade unions of skilled workers. The earliest worker organ-
izations in Russia seem to have depended heavily on the solidarity of the
rural communities from which they had migrated, rather than on that of
their occupation or class. Johnson argued that it is wrong to separate pea-
sant and proletarians, as if individuals were either one or the other. His
evidence showed that Moscow workers travelled back and forth between
the city and the countryside, and were firmly attached to both, and that those
from the same area often came together to form zemliachestsvo or clubs in
the city. This explains many of the traits that set these ‘peasant-workers’, as
Johnson called them, ‘apart from the workers of other countries.’ The tra-
dition of collective action was, he pointed out, ‘far stronger in the country,
reinforced by the village assembly, and perhaps, by repartitional tenure.’
He found that ‘industries and regions that in Marxist terms should have
been most advanced – those with large mechanized factories whose workers
were spiritually further from the countryside – had average or below aver-
age rates of labor unrest, whereas … those that were smaller and less mech-
anized and had workers more closely tied to the village – had much higher
rates, especially if workers were drawn from the same village or region, and
especially if they possessed a piece of land.’ He concluded that, in this way
‘the countryside may have given impetus to the workers’ movement.’87
Proletarian was not, however, the urban identity that most organized
workers adopted. That of their trade or craft seems to have been more
important, so both Menshevik and Bolshevik members of the intelligentsia
continuously had to urge the unions which sprang into existence after
the revolution of 1905 to shed what they saw as their narrow and selfish
tsekhovshchina, craft or trade consciousness, and become true proletarians.
Many trade unionists seem to have been reluctant to do this. The industry-
based unions formed at the time often turned out, on closer inspection,
to be confederations of semi-autonomous craft groups. The St. Petersburg
Bakery Union, for instance, had 12 separate sections for different kinds
of bakers. The union of office clerks and bookkeepers in the city had six,
the metalworkers, no less than 116. In Moscow, the union of workers in
the textile industry was divided into eight trade or occupational groups,
and the union of industrial construction workers into six. Metalworkers
had originally organized to unite factory committees, but subsequently
decided to organize into 52 occupational ‘sections’, each with their own
funds and directing boards. In response to the repeated urging of their
Social Democrat friends, some unions formed larger craft unions or fed-
erations. The pattern-makers joined the woodworkers’ union. The elec-
trical workers joined the metal workers, and the knitters joined the textile
workers union, though this can hardly be seen as transcending or dis-
carding occupational or trade loyalties, since the merged groups seem to
have remained entirely separate entities. The 70 knitters who ‘joined’ the
textile workers union, to take one example, still met separately to discuss
their special interests and kept their own funds.88
Bolsheviks had every reason to describe any kind of collective action
among workers as proof of the existence of a working class, in whose inter-
est they claimed to act. Many Western scholars who have studied workers
in Petrograd and Moscow evidently sympathize with them, and seem dis-
inclined to examine the Bolsheviks’ claim too critically, so it is not always
easy to distinguish hopes and wishful thinking from the authentic voice of
the working class. Pipes acidly observed that ‘hordes of graduate students,
steered by their professors, in the Soviet Union, as well as the West, espe-
cially in the United States, have assiduously combed historical sources in
the hope of unearthing evidence of worker radicalism in pre-Revolutionary
Russia. The results are weighty tomes, filled with mostly meaningless
events and statistics, that prove only while history is always interesting,
history books can be vacuous and dull.’89
He went on to provide ample grounds for his scepticism about both the
existence of a working class, and its oft-acclaimed leading role in the revo-
lution. Industrial workers were a tiny proportion, less than 2%, of the popu-
lation of Russia. Moreover many factory workers were employed in rural areas,
and many of those in Moscow and St. Petersburg were still peasants, leading
him, like Johnson, to describe them as ‘a branch of the peasantry rather than
a distinct group’.90 While acknowledging that ‘proletarian attitudes’ emerged
amongst skilled workers in the 1880s, he pointed out that very few workers
were still unionized in 1914, and that protest against the regime was always
led by intellectuals and students, rather than by organized manual workers.
For that reason he opened his study of the Russian revolution in 1899, the
year of mass protests at Moscow University.91 Moreover, he showed that the
tiny covert political parties could not have co-ordinated or mobilized a
working class movement, since they were dominated by the intelligentsia,
and had only a handful of workers amongst their members. The intelligentsia
similarly dominated other assemblies, which the unwary might assume to be
examples of working class action, such as the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies of
St. Petersburg in 1905 and 1917.92
Much of the evidence thought to describe the emergence of a working class

does not answer these objections, since it refers to isolated events and
episodes, and is often rather ambiguous, unless we have already accepted
that process of class formation must have already been in train. Zelnik, for
instance, identified some of the more notable strikes in the last three decades
of the nineteenth century. He acknowledged that they commonly ‘involved
members of the intelligentsia or workers propagandized by them’, and that
workers’ most significant organizational creation, the kruzhok or workers’
circle, was ‘the plebeian equivalent of the aristocratic salon’, but went on to
say that a few of these ‘displayed skilled leadership and organization’, some-
times ‘entailed co-operation among workers from numerous factories’, and
even ‘invoked the language of collectivism and social justice, if not doctrinally
articulated socialism’.93 If one has already decided that there was a work-
ing class revolution in 1917, then these are the exciting preliminaries to its
formation. If we have not, they were no more than occasional strikes.
Hogan’s in-depth examination of the impact of the Electoral Law of 1905
in St. Petersburg provided workers with possibilities similar to those which
peasants had exploited to the full. The law required workers at every work-
place to come together on election day to choose delegates who, indirectly,
would choose members of the state duma. She reasonably suggested that
this ‘magnified the workers’ sense of himself as a worker rather than as
a citizen’ and went on to describe the subsequent creation of a number
of bodies which assumed and encouraged a class outlook, such as the
St. Petersburg Council of the Unemployed, elected by those attending soup
kitchens in the city in 1906, which organized district councils to link
the employed and unemployed in the city, and successfully, if briefly, cam-
paigned to persuade the city duma to initiate public works as well as public
relief.94
McKean’s evidence – in a weighty tome that is far from vacuous and dull –
is more persuasive since it does not describe isolated events and episodes,
which we can frame as we wish but provides a continuous record and
analysis of collective action among workers and revolutionaries over the
entire decade before 1917. Much of his evidence might be cited in support
of Pipes’s sceptical view. He records, for example, how trade unions having
reached their peak with 245,335 members in 1907, had been reduced by
employers’ and police opposition in the years before the war to ‘a paltry
31,246.’ Many of them were poorly run, and since they were suppressed
during the war, whatever their class-forming role may have been, it was
then in abeyance.95 He also shows that workers’ participation in other asso-
ciations, such as the kassy or insurance funds, was minimal.96 Moreover,
workers did not correspond to the image of a revolutionary proletariat,
since the most active strikers over all these years were artisans employed in
tailoring, baking, printing shops and especially small and medium-sized
metal-working plants in the Vyborg district of St. Petersburg, rather than
the more proletarian workers in the gigantic ‘Fordist’ factories in Neva,

Peterhof Side, and other districts.97 His evidence also confirms that revo-
lutionary parties, including or perhaps especially, the Bolsheviks, could not
have been agents or catalysts, or leaders of a class formation, since their
organizations lacked any means of keeping in regular contact with workers.98
After examining hundreds of disputes, he thinks workers were most con-
cerned about the disrespectful and arbitrary way their managers and foremen
treated them, and not much influenced by socialist ideals. The radicalization
of a minority of skilled workers, he decides, ‘owed very little to the endeav-
ours of the revolutionary parties’ and ‘far more to their acquaintance with
urban and industrial life.’99
Workers demonstrated their radicalization in just one collective insti-
ution, strikes and stoppages. There was a very rapid increase in their number
in 1911 and 1912, in common, one might add, with several other industrial
societies, and about 40% of the total number recorded in the entire Empire
were in St. Petersburg. Although ‘stoppages motivated by purely economic
objectives were responsible for the bulk of working days lost in St. Petersburg
during the years immediately prior to the war’, about 60% of all strikes were
politically inspired, a number of them being sympathy or commemorative
strikes, especially following the massacre in the Lena Goldfields on 4 April
1912, and therefore demonstrate some class loyalty.100 Moreover, although
they lacked formal union organization, McKean shows that strikers somehow
found their own leaders, and created ‘surrogate forms of organization’, mean-
ing temporary strike committees and general meetings which, despite being
ad hoc, amorphous and ephemeral, were able to organize quite long disputes,
during which they commonly demonstrated their class perspective by per-
suading semi- and unskilled workers, though not white collar and service
workers, in non-striking factories to join them.101
In the early months of the war, the number of strikes declined, but it
climbed again during the summer of 1915 and through 1916, and unlike
the pre-war strikes, they enveloped all sectors of the economy, all kinds of
factories, and were more evenly spread geographically across the city. In
the first seven weeks of 1917, there was ‘a pronounced increase in the fre-
quency of political strikes, especially in Petrograd where virtually all strikes
became political.’102 Moreover, strikers increasingly took their demon-
strations to the protected city centre, and specifically to the Nevskii Prospekt,
on which most government offices were located, and which the police,
troops or Cossacks became progressively less willing to defend. One such
general strike of 27 February 1917 was said to have been supported by some
80% of the city’s working population, including many civil servants. It was
these massed crowds in the centre of the city that persuaded the tsar to
abdicate and brought his regime to an end.
What are we to make of such evidence? It does not confirm the for-
mation of a working class, nor allow us to dismiss the sceptical view. But it
is surely enough to demonstrate the beginnings of a working class. Russian

workers’ actions at this time bore a certain resemblance to those of English
workers in the eighteenth century, who similarly struck repeatedly without
any permanent, formally organized national associations.103 The circum-
stances of English workers were, one need hardly add, different in a great
many respects, and we can of course never know whether the Russian strikes
might eventually have led to national trade unions and a fully-formed,
working class like the English, or whether their solidarity would simply have
fizzled out, as that of American workers often seems to have done. If, how-
ever, we decline to recognize an emergent Russian working class, it is difficult
to think of a more appropriate term. They had become something more than
‘a branch of the peasantry’, and rather more defined than mere ‘working
people’ or ‘industrial workers’ or crowds. McKean consistently referred to
them as the working class without misleading anyone, since he also spent
time discussing the peasant elements within it, its geographical concentration,
and the ‘frailties’ of its collective institutions.104
At the end of the tsarist regime, we may therefore identify five classes
that had demonstrated some degree of collective consciousness, solidarity and
action: two of rather ancient origins, the service class and intelligentsia, and
three more recent ones, the provincial landed gentry, and the emergent classes
of peasants and workers. Only the peasants corresponded with the official
classification of the population, but the state had indirectly contributed to the
formation of all five, and their relationship with the state seems to have
been the critical determinant of their character and careers. The provincial
landed gentry that sprang to life only as their political privileges and eco-
nomic foundations were about to disappear, was only able to organize rapidly
and effectively because it could take advantage of various pre-existing state-
created institutions, such as the governing boards of the zemstva, the noble
assemblies, the marshals of the nobility and the State Council. The service
class had deeper roots, being defined by, and dependent upon, the state appa-
ratus, even if it had still not quite erased the ancient division between dvo-
rianstvo and chinovniki, or that between the capital and provinces.
The intelligentsia was perhaps the most independent class, indeed looks
like a spontaneous emanation of civil society, emerging from exchanges
and contacts made in aristocratic salons or through journals, papers and
discussion circles, and seeming to rest on nothing more substantial than
individual conscience and conviction. It had, however, originated in schools
that prepared sons of the nobility for state service, and sought to instill an
ethic of service, which accounts for their disillusionment and disaffection
when they actually entered it. It had also benefited from the spread of the
zemstva, whose educated employees had no readily available alternative
affiliations and identities, and it was able to find audiences and recruits in
the universities, at least when they were free of state repression. The state
also assisted its formation by stifling other organized interests, such as trade
unions and self-governing professions, and unintentionally provided

intellectuals with a mandate and mission.105
The Electoral Law of 1905 seems to have been the trigger which initiated
the formation of a class of peasants by prompting their isolated villages to
connect with one another via their elected representatives in the First and
Second Dumas, though the period during which they organized and com-
municated with one another was so brief, and is so poorly documented, that
their class seems more promise than accomplished reality. There is rather more
evidence of organization and communication among workers, but any fuller
account of their formation as a class would also make constant references to
various political decisions. First of all, it would refer to specific pieces of legis-
lation: to the 1903 law, which was ‘the first legal recognition by the author-
ities of the workers as a corporate body’ and ‘gave workers, under certain
conditions, the right to choose a kind of shop steward’; to the legalization of
approved trade unions in 1906; to the electoral laws of 1905 and 1907, which
granted the franchise to a section of the working population; and to the Social
Insurance Laws of 1912, which allowed workers to elect representatives to
administer the funds of kassy, and provided the Social Democratic party with
a means of stimulating working class consciousness to some degree.106
The state was also involved more directly because a number of the most
successful early worker organizations had been created by a state official,
Serge Zubatov, the head of a special section of the Okhrana, the secret
police, until 1903. Pospielovsky called Zubatov’s state-created unions ‘the
real birthplace of Russian trade unions’ which ‘provided the trade-unionist
movement with its first cadres of professional trade union workers.’107 The
protest before the Winter Palace that launched the revolution of 1905 was
led by the Assembly of Mill and Textile Workers, which had been created
by Father Georgii Gapon, Zubatov’s successor in many respects, who also
had the backing of the secret police.108 Finally, one would have to mention
the state decision that had fatal consequences for its own survival – the
decision to enter the war – since the economic and social dislocations, and
disasters during it, seem more than anything to have accelerated the forma-
tion of the working class and explain the disaffection of the police and of
troops who had previously controlled striking workers without difficulty.109
It is only too easy, in discussing any revolution, to take the revolutionaries’
word that they overthrew the state, and to overlook the state’s own con-
tribution to the mobilization of the revolutionaries.
Continuities in the management of stratification in Soviet

Russia
In his account of the revolution, published in 1935, Chamberlin referred

to the revolution of February 1917 as ‘one of the most leaderless, spon-
taneous, anonymous revolutions of all time.’ Although his remark has been
picked over many times, no one has been able to contradict it with a plau-
sible narrative of class conflicts that continued into the subsequent seizure
of power by the Bolsheviks, and the civil war that followed.110 One may
only be reasonably sure that certain class conflicts did not occur. The
Bolsheviks, it is clear, never had to confront a proud and resolute land-
owning aristocracy with its own regional bases of power, but only the
rather less formidable opposition of office-holding nobility, whose ethic of
service, like that of many officials, seems to have been transferred, rather
painlessly, first to the Provisional Government and then to the Bolsheviks.111
Rigby likened the latter turnover to ‘those occurring in Washington in
the heyday of the spoils system’.112 Nor did they have to confront a power-
ful, organized bourgeois class, since as we have seen Russia had never
developed a bourgeoisie remotely commensurate with the scale of its indus-
trial and commercial development, or with the bourgeoisie of Soviet folk-
lore. Two of the organized and self-conscious classes, the intelligentsia and
emergent working class, were to be found on both sides, and hence can
only provide examples of intra-class conflicts.113 Disentangling class align-
ments has proved difficult for analysts of every revolution, and the Russian
is no exception, even though its victors, by their constant use of a class
vocabulary, have persuaded some observers otherwise. In the present inves-
tigation, however, we will leave such questions aside, since it is more
important to identify the class alignments that became a permanent part of
the Soviet regime. Fortunately, these seem somewhat easier to analyse and
describe.
The Bolsheviks claimed, and believed, that they were inaugurating an
entirely new society and even a new age for mankind. The vocabulary they
used to legitimate their actions was, of course, entirely new. They acted
in the name of revolution, or the working class, or socialism, or the laws
of History, but in certain respects their actions differed little from those
of their predecessors.
To begin with, they claimed a monopoly of political power, and from the
very first moment, used it to manage the social stratification of Russia,
much as their predecessors had sought to do. The advances that civil
society, and in particular intellectuals and advocates, had made since the
reforms of Alexander II, and such progress as trade unions had been able to
cling on to after the revolution of 1905, were all reversed. The consti-
tutional protections of individual and corporate rights proposed by the
Provisional Government were forgotten. Despite the somersault in rhetoric,
the relationship between the state and civil society, which we have sug-
gested is the key to understanding how classes are formed, was not at all
revolutionary, but a reversion to the kind of relationship which obtained in
pre-Reform Russia. This might be documented in a hundred ways, in the
history of any organized interest in civil society, but perhaps the most
telling examples are the extensions of state power over the most trivial and
innocent activities, such as stamp-collecting clubs or artely, the small vol-

untary groupings of handicraft and service workers.114 Since the relation-
ship between the state and civil society was similar to that of pre-Reform
Russia, it follows that the forms and mechanisms of stratification that
emerged under the Soviet rule would also bear a marked resemblance to
those of its predecessors.
The first, and most notable, continuity with the tsarist regime was that
between the service class designated in the Table of Ranks and the nomen-
klatura.115 The former seems, in fact, to have inspired the latter, which ori-
ginally referred simply to the lists of those positions that required party
approval, though gradually, during and after industrialization, as the num-
ber of such positions increased, it came over time to be used colloquially,
like chin and chinovniki before it, as a collective term to describe the holders
of such positions.116 Stalin, who is generally credited with inventing the
nomenklatura, had previously been responsible for appointing officers in
the Red Army, so it may well be that, like the Table of Ranks, it was ori-
ginally inspired by military usage. As it happened, the nomenklatura, like
the Table of Ranks, had 14 ranks.117
Apart from occupying all the significant decision-making positions in
all the political, economic, military, scientific, educational, cultural and
recreational institutions in the country, nomenklaturists came in time to be
distinguished from the rest of the population: by their access to special
stores from which they could obtain the best food, clothing and other con-
sumption goods; by privileged access to most services, such as theatre seats,
medical facilities and holiday resorts; and by access to the outside world,
meaning passports and currencies for foreign travel, as well as foreign
books, newspapers and films.118 There can be little doubt that they had
a distinctive way of life, and that others recognized them, for though
they did not flaunt and publicize their lifestyle – Voslensky called them an
‘invisible aristocracy’ – certain aspects of it could hardly be hidden. Their
clothing for a start, and they tended to drive not only distinctive makes of
car, with distinctive number plates, and on some centre-city roads could
drive in special reserved lanes. Since their privileged position also enabled
then to obtain access for their children to educational institutions, they
also had means of transmitting their privileges to the next generation.119
And just as the tsarist regime had sought to police the Table of Ranks, so in
the same spirit the Soviet regime took steps to ensure that the nomenklatura
did not mingle casually and indiscriminately with the rest of the popu-
lation. Its members were, ‘for security reasons’, warned to ‘restrict their
social contacts, and as far as possible not make friends outside the nomen-
klatura.’ By Voslensky’s account, the nomenklaturists followed this injunc-
tion to such an extent that they came to believe and to act as if ‘they were
living not in the USSR but in another, entirely different and special
country’, which he dubbed Nomenklaturia.120
The class privileges of the nomenklatura were noticed by Nikita Khrushchev,

who was evidently embarrassed by them, and sought to end them by impos-
ing time limits on the tenure of office.121 By his time, however, it was far
too well-entrenched, and in all probability his attempts to eliminate or
reform it were one of the main reasons for his own downfall.122 A short
time after succeeding him, his successor, Brezhnev, definitively confirmed
the ‘stability of the cadres’ and the principle of life tenure.123 The nomen-
klatura therefore continued to develop as a class until the very end of the
Soviet regime, In 1983 Rigby estimated that it consisted of about two million
people.124
Its durability as a class was demonstrated by its survival after the Soviet
regime collapsed. Former members made up three-quarters of Yeltsin’s
presidential administration, and the overwhelming majority of regional
elites, so that ‘the whole system of government was within a nomenklatura
framework.’ The Soviet tradition of ‘selection and allocation of cadres’,
Krystanovskaya and White observed, was, in effect, revived and with it the
‘Table of Ranks’, that … had given rise to the nomenklatura itself when it
was established in the early 1920s.’125 Senior nomenklatura managers in
industry seemed to have a pronounced sense of their class interests.126
When their efforts to have the initial privatization law amended to grant
them a larger proportion of the shares of ‘their’ enterprises failed, they col-
laborated in various manoeuvres to defend themselves both against the
numerically superior workers, and against ‘outsiders’ who might wish to
dispossess them, and seize control of plants that they insisted belonged to
them.127
A second continuity with the tsarist regime may be observed in the treat-
ment of the peasants, despite the abolition of strip farming and repartition,
and indeed their whole communal way of life brought about by the collec-
tivization launched in 1928. Communes themselves were replaced by
much larger sovkhoz or kolkhoz, state farms or collective farms, headed by
the Bolshevik’s version of the tsar’s ‘land commandants’, state-appointed,
party-approved managers of sovkhoz, or state-appointed though nominally-
elected chairmen of the kolkhoz.128 Whatever degree of self-government
communes had previously enjoyed was thereby eliminated. Their private
plots, livestock and property were also confiscated. Kulaks or wealthy pea-
sants were the special target, but other distinctions between the serednaks
or middle peasants, bednyaks or poor peasants and batraks or day labourers
were also erased, so that there remained just one single undifferentiated
official category of agricultural labourers.129 At the end of it all, however,
peasants were no less sharply differentiated from the rest of the population
than they had been prior to their emancipation, and no less expected to
‘silently obey’ their new masters than enserfed peasants had been. In
its first decade, the Soviet regime eliminated the possibility of peasants
developing as a class by imprisoning or killing the leaders of the Socialist-
Revolutionaries, the political party most closely identified with peasants’

interests at the national level. And since collectivization had entailed mass
executions and starvation, it was unlikely that any new leaders would
spontaneously emerge to express their interests as a class.
The regime institutionalized peasants’ separation from the rest of the
population in a variety of ways. Their status was recorded on their internal
passports, and they were deprived of the right to travel, a return to a form
of serfdom. For the first 40 years of the Soviet regime, their welfare arrange-
ments also remained distinctly inferior to those of industrial workers,
indeed to a considerable degree, they were left to fend for themselves.
It was only in 1964, when the proportion of the labour force engaged in
agriculture had fallen to 40%, that Soviet law provided that collective farm
workers would be guaranteed a pension on retirement, though this was
considerably below that provided to urban industrial workers.130 Rural
medical care and educational provision also remained inferior to that in
the cities. After documenting its relative deficiencies in the 1980s, Davis
argued that these were due less to any deliberate state decision, than to
policies that had given a low priority to roads and sanitation, which made
it difficult for farms to supplement their health care arrangements as indus-
trial enterprises in urban areas had been able to do. In the present context
Soviet intentions are less important than the fact that peasants were still
distinguished from the rest of the population. They had, as Davis acknow-
ledged, a ‘low status in the power hierarchy’ of the regime, and ‘few effective
channels of appeal.’131
In its treatment of peasants, McDaniel observed, the Soviet regime ‘mimic-
ked some of the conservative traits of tsarist society.’ In the nineteenth cen-
tury, the peasant had been ‘most definitely a second-class citizen, subject to
the arbitrary will of local authorities and the object of numerous restrictive
laws on mobility and property ownership applicable only to this group.’
The Soviet regime, in his view, was little different. ‘Soviet law was highly
particularistic in its designation of the rights and responsibilities of differ-
ent groups’, and ‘this particularism bears striking similarities to the logic
of the tsarist estate system, which also sought to freeze the position of
every social group in a state ordered hierarchy.’132 Peasants therefore con-
tinued to be a lifeless, leaderless class, recognized by the state and in law,
but incapable of formulating any collective consciousness, creating any
collective organization, or taking any collective action.
The intelligentsia are the notable example of abrupt and profound dis-
continuity with the old regime, though since the role of the new intel-
ligentsia was defined in opposition to that of the old there was necessarily
an element of continuity, and besides, at various times, ghosts of the old
reappeared. The first Soviet rulers were, of course, themselves members of
that old intelligentsia, and some no doubt maintained the intense dedi-
cation to the service to the Russian people, and to humanity, that had
distinguished it. Having acquired power, however, and grown use to exer-
cising it, most of them, as Djilas suggested, progressively acquired an entirely
different collective consciousness, akin to that of the service class they had
dispossessed. They are therefore best understood less by reference to their
predecessors in the old intelligentsia than to the chinovniki.
For the overwhelming majority of the old intelligentsia, however, no such
conversion was possible. They were unsympathetic to the Bolshevik cause.
The Bolsheviks wooed them on occasion, and persuaded a small number to
accept their patronage, and for a few years at least, granted them a modest
degree of freedom. Most, however, preferred either to emigrate, or were
forced to emigrate. Some were able to withdraw, and live ‘quiet, private,
unsubsidized and unadvertised lives’. Some were imprisoned, some shot.133
The institutions on which they had once depended, their ‘thick’ journals,
salons, country houses, were all suppressed, and since the universities had
been transformed beyond recognition, they could no longer serve as ‘islands
of liberty’ or provide any kind of shelter for them. From an early point, the
regime made clear that it would manage all cultural life, literature, visual
and performing arts, so that they would serve the interests of the regime, or
of the working class, and this would entail the creation of a new type of
intelligentsia. Overall responsibility for this mission was passed to a single
body, the Commissariat of Enlightenment in addition to its functions as a
Ministry of Education, and it was later joined by other supervisory agencies
and specialist educational institutions.134
The new official intelligentsia that eventually emerged was salaried, worked
full-time for the future of socialism, and consisted of an officially-designated
band of white collar occupations, which had little in common with Russian
civil society’s original intelligentsia.135 It was initially described as ‘a toiling
intelligentsia’, then as ‘the new Soviet intelligentsia … a stratum with charac-
teristics never before seen in history’. In time, it came to include everyone
who worked with their minds rather than their hands. After examining its
internal composition in 1960, Labedz observed that ‘Writers, artists, tech-
nical specialists, managers, apparatchiki, army officers, state bureaucrats,
doctors, teachers – all these and the army of clerks and foremen do not
seem to form a very cohesive group. Is it’, he wondered, ‘conscious of itself
as a group and of its oppositions to other groups?’ He cautiously concluded
that ‘No clear-cut answer can be given to such a question.’136 Bearing in
mind the sharp differences in income, prestige, power within it, and that
over the subsequent 40 years no evidence of any kind of collective con-
sciousness came to light, we can now firmly answer No! to his question.
The interstices of freedom, which had enabled the tsarist intelligentsia to
emerge, were sealed by the Soviet regime. The Soviet intelligentsia therefore
showed little more collective consciousness or life than Soviet peasants.137
It must, therefore, be seen as another inert official category rather than a
class in our understanding of the term.
This is, however, not quite the end of the story. All memories of the
tsarist intelligentsia had evidently not been erased, for after the death of
Stalin in 1953, and more precisely, following Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’
exposing Stalin’s crimes in 1956, a miniature, dissident intelligentsia, briefly
reemerged amongst a handful of artists, poets and writers, joined by some
natural scientists.138 Like their predecessors, they were also drawn from
those in relatively privileged material positions, with higher educational
qualifications. They also expressed their alienation from the regime, and
from the society around them, and seemed also to share the intense social
conscience and sense of duty to the Russian people that had distinguished
the old intelligentsia.139 Although initially rather sympathetic, Khrushchev
soon changed his mind about this spontaneous and unofficial intelligentsia,
defined its outspoken members as ‘parasites’, and suppressed them.
Somehow or other, the aspirations and ethics of the original intelligentsia
nonetheless survived, and inspired a few brave souls to resume its historic
mission. Pipes suggested they were able to do so because the cultural her-
itage of the old intelligentsia, ‘especially as embodied in its greatest single
glory, Russian classical literature’, exercised such a strong hold over all edu-
cated Russians that ‘a class that is historically dead acquires, posthumously,
ever new heirs and successors.’140 Thirty years later, after Gorbachev’s
glas’nost, more heirs and successors emerged, and in much greater numbers,
to the evident astonishment of Gorbachev and his colleagues. These
re-appearances under the Soviet regime of replicas of the original intelligentsia
were, however, too intermittent, and their numbers too small, to allow us
to recognize them as a class, though since one of the hallmarks of any class
is its ability to transmit its shared consciousness to future generations, they
provide striking corroboration of the class credentials of the original tsarist
intelligentsia.
There is one remaining class formation, or possible class formation, the
class which the whole Soviet experiment was about, and in whose name it
always acted: the emergent working class. When the Bolsheviks seized
power, we have observed about 2% of the adult population of Russia were
industrial workers, but when the Soviet regime collapsed, over 60% of the
working population could be formally classified as workers or working
class.141 In census terms, therefore, there can be no doubt that a working
class emerged during the Soviet regime, but what sort of class was it?
It is difficult to see them simply as successors of the emergent working
class that helped to topple the tsarist regime. The workers in Petrograd and
several other cities, as we have already observed, organized against the
Bolsheviks, and their ad hoc ‘councils’ and ‘assemblies’ were suppressed,
and their leaders imprisoned. The surviving trade unions were also dis-
solved, though not without a struggle, and spontaneous factory commit-
tees were incorporated into new state-sponsored unions, whose members
were recruited, as radical parties before the revolution had always hoped
they might be, from all employees – blue collar, white collar, technical spe-
cialists and managers – in particular industries or sectors of industry.142 The
working class was, in short, reconstructed by the Soviet regime. There is a
certain resemblance in this respect to other trade union movements, who
all, in different ways that we shall shortly examine, broke out of their orig-
inal craft enclaves, recruited all kinds of workers, and could then claim to
be class movements. Soviet Russia, however, was unique in that the state
forcibly eliminated the original craft unions, refused to allow workers to
choose their own form of organization, and when they did so, as ‘sections’
within the new unions, took steps to eliminate them. Soviet trade unions
and the Soviet working class were not, it is clear, the heirs and successors of
the emergent working class of the tsarist era.143
Leaders of regime themselves looked on workers as a new social entity
and therefore spent much time in their early years arguing about how it
should be organized, what the functions of trade unions and the goals of
class action and class struggle might be now that capitalism had been over-
thrown. Trotsky argued that since there was no longer anyone against
whom the workers had to be protected, and since they could hardly nego-
tiate with, or strike against, themselves, trade unions should be integrated
with the state, turned into an instrument of management which would dis-
cipline those who shirked the universal obligation to work.144 By contrast,
Tomsky, chairman of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions and
many others wanted trade unions themselves to be directly responsible for
managing industry.145 In 1920, Lenin authoritatively settled the argument.
He argued that a trade union ‘is in fact a school: a school of administration,
a school of economic management, a school of communism.’ Since the dic-
tatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by the entire proletariat,
trade unions should be a ‘link’ or ‘transmission belt’ from the ‘vanguard
that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class’ and exercises that
dictatorship on their behalf to ‘the mass of the advanced class, and from
the latter to the mass of the working people.’ Though not ‘designed for
coercion’, trade unions should therefore have powers to discipline workers
in their own courts. He refused, however, to contemplate granting them
any kind of collective managerial responsibilities.146
There are no grounds, as we have already suggested, for accepting the claim
that workers themselves had become the new ruling class, or that their new
rulers, the nomenklaturists, were merely their ‘vanguard’ with interests identi-
cal to those of workers. The possibility remains, however, that Soviet workers,
though deprived of the right to strike, to form their own trade unions and to
choose their own leaders, might have developed some new kind of class for-
mation with a collective consciousness and solidarity quite different from that
of their predecessors or their counterparts in capitalist societies.
In the early years of collectivization, the regime itself and some of its
Western sympathizers liked to think that there was evidence that socialism
had in fact transformed the motivation of workers, so that they now worked
with an enthusiasm and commitment, and at speeds, that were impossible
under capitalism.147 Outstanding cases, such as the coal miner Stakhanov,
were widely publicized and emulated in many Soviet industries, and for a
while Stakhanovites became an organized national movement.148 Other
workers were also reported to have engaged in various forms of comradely
socialist ‘emulation’, where worker brigades competed with other brigades
in the same factory, or with other factories, producing similar products.
Many workers, called subbotniks, were supposed to have volunteered to work
without pay on Saturdays to ensure that their factory did its part in fulfilment
of the original mission. Others were supposed to have prepared so-called
vstrechny plans, meaning counter-plans, in which they voluntarily decided to
exceed official plan targets.149 Could these have been, as the regime some-
times claimed, expressions of a new form of class consciousness?
At first sight, much of the evidence might equally well demonstrate the
kind of competitiveness found among Western workers under piece rate or
group bonus schemes before workers themselves have been able to take
steps to restrain or undermine it. Since the regime routinely exaggerated
the achievements of socialism, it is difficult to dismiss critics who suggested
that these were another example of the same, instigated, staged and pub-
licized by party and trade union officials.150 In the end, however, even if we
were to accept them as authentic expressions of a new form of collective
solidarity or class consciousness, they were so brief and isolated that it is
difficult to accept them as evidence of a new class formation. No student of
the Soviet economy has ever suggested that it continued to benefit from a
special commitment or enthusiasm of its workforce comparable to that
often attributed to Japanese industry after World War II.
Some other evidence is therefore required to show that this was an
authentic and durable class, and capable of spontaneous collective action.
Lane thought he had provided some. He argued that the working class in
the U.S.S.R. ‘probably has greater influence in society than does the work-
ing class in capitalist society … symbolically the working class participates
in the institutions of Soviet power.’ He thought that the fact that about
10% of manual workers were party members, ‘illustrates that this class is
well integrated into the structure of the Soviet political system.’ He then
noted that ‘up to the time of Gorbachev the working class acted as an effec-
tive “veto group” on the political elite’, meaning ‘that the working class as
a collectivity has the power to prevent any action by the government or
the employers, unless it is perceived to be in their interests.’ Elsewhere, he
pointed out that they could also veto ‘the speeding up of the tempo of pro-
duction’ and ‘management’s quest to increase levels of productivity.’151
None of these, however, satisfy our initial, not very stringent, criteria of a
class. These required evidence that its members themselves recognize and
define their common interest and concerns (not that these were recognized
and defined for them by others), that they form their own national, repre-
sentative organizations (not that some of them were admitted to a party
organized by others), that their members spontaneously respond to their
circumstances in a similar manner, and decided on their own course of col-
lective action (rather than the state doing so symbolically). Most observers
have found that this symbolical status counted for little in everyday life.152
Moreover, the supposed ‘veto powers’ of the working class did not prevent the
regime imposing extensive and fearsome instruments of control over workers,
and exercising total control over trade unions.153 One piece of post-Soviet
research based on ‘records from the largest metal-working factory in the Soviet
capital’ showed that ‘a profound rift had developed between the party and the
class which it was supposed to represent’ by the mid-twenties. By this time all
opposition had been defined as ‘criminal’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ and
every voice of opposition had been extinguished. It did not discover any kind
of worker veto on ‘the tempo of production’ or anything else.154
Straus argued that the working class under Stalin had concluded ‘a social
contract’, under which it refrained from collective protest in return for
its honoured status in Soviet life.155 A contract, however, implies, indeed
requires, consent, and if he had explained how the mass of workers, or their
representatives, had indicated their consent to this ‘contract’, we might
perhaps be able to take the absence of strikes after 1934, other than those
against the official unions, as an indication of the formation of a new
working class. But he did not do so. Rather more persuasively, Filtzer showed
‘the small working class’ had been ‘atomized’ by the ‘ruling stratum’ which
‘meant breaking down its collective traditions and suppressing all forms of
collective protest.’156 Protest was, he observed, ‘individualized’, and expressed
only by absenteeism, insubordination, frequent job-changing and drunken-
ness, all of which are reminiscent of the ‘weapons of the weak’ used by
peasants before the revolution. The only collective solidarity amongst the
workforce that he detected was local, informal and personal. It rested on
the mutual exchange of favours (blat) with immediate supervisors or palm-
greasing (namazki).
Since the Soviet working class meets none of our requirements, it must
be seen as one more of the inert classes of Soviet Union, like the intel-
ligentsia or as a puppet class, rather like the puppet regimes that Soviet
forces installed across Eastern Europe.157 This conclusion may be confirmed
by comparing it with both its predecessors and its successors. In terms of
energy, organizing skill and determination, it hardly comes close to the
emergent working class of St. Petersburg in February 1917. Once the Pro-
visional Government had assumed power, factory workers, Smith records,
‘unleashed a ferocious onslaught on the old factory order.’ After convening
general meetings of workers, they decided on ‘mass expulsions of unpopular
administrative personnel, in one factory after another, and the organizing
of elections to select their successors.’158 A comparison with its post-Soviet
successor is no less relevant and illuminating. If the Soviet regime had

indeed formed a working class, then one would reasonably expect that,
after generations of experience, it would know how to organize to protect
its interests when the regime collapsed, and perhaps abrogate the ‘social
contract’ if there was one, or negotiate a new one. In the event, workers in
post-Soviet Russia seem extraordinarily supine and somnolent, or ‘patient’
as Ashwin preferred to put it, despite extreme provocation, such as not
receiving any wages for months on end.159 They seemed incapable of sum-
moning meetings to define their interests, of finding spokespersons or
leaders, or of agreeing on any course of action, and seldom called strikes,
except when prompted by their managers, who used them as a means of
bringing pressure on Moscow.160 In the face of managerial manoeuvres to
take control of privatized factories, workers seem to have been entirely
uncertain about how they should protect their interests, even though they
were legally the majority owners of many factories.161
The Soviet working class was, we must conclude, a figment of party leaders’
imagination, an official creation, an indispensable part of the regime’s ide-
ology, but one to which civil society was never permitted to respond. In
that respect, there is a degree of continuity with the tsarist regime. We
earlier mentioned the contribution of Serge Zubatov, the head of the
Special Section of the Okhrana, the imperial secret police, to the creation of
trade unions, who acted in the hope that the tsar would ‘place himself at
the head of the working class.’162 The Bolsheviks might be said
to have done just that. Zubatov himself committed suicide when the tsar
abdicated, but Soviet trade unions might well be seen as the completion of
his work. Trud was closer to the mark that it realized when it boasted that
‘the position of trade unions changes basically with the victory of Socialist
revolution. From an organization of the oppressed class they turn into an
organization of the ruling class ….’163
Classes in the two Russias compared
Despite the abolition of private property and of hereditary nobility, we

have found a considerable measure of continuity in the nature of the
stratification of Russian society under both the tsarist and Soviet regimes,
and in the mechanisms by which it was maintained. Both regimes sought
to differentiate and ‘classify’ the population for their own purposes. Both
also sought to restrain civil society, and as a result, the officially-designated
categories into which they divided its population never spontaneously
developed into self-conscious and organized classes. The distinction that
really mattered in both cases was that between civil society and the state,
whose officials formed a well-defined ruling class, and had no need to
organize independently since the state itself served as an association to
protect their class interests.
The main difference between the two regimes was that the tsarist regime,
especially after the reforms of Alexander II, controlled civil society in an
inconsistent and erratic manner. It tried to combine an autocracy with
limited and temporary freedoms of assembly, of speech, of the press, of
association, and when threatened, responded with repression or modest
concessions, and sometimes both. The inevitable muddle and inconsis-
tency in its policies provided a degree of freedom which enabled interests
in civil society – intellectuals, provincial landed gentry, peasants and
workers – to organize as classes. The Soviet regime, by contrast, created a far
more efficient and comprehensive apparatus of control, and armed with
an ideology which had considerable popular appeal, had few inhibitions
about terrorizing, silencing and reorganizing civil society as it wished. It
could therefore enforce its definition of its official class categories more
effectively than its predecessors, and allowed much less opportunity for
unscripted, unofficial classes to appear.
It is rather misleading therefore to portray the October Revolution as a
transition from a class-divided to a classless society, or to claim that Russia
had advanced by means of a revolution, or by ‘direct political agency’ to
some superior kind of social order that property-owning capitalist societies
could never hope to emulate. In fact, the tsarist regime made continuous
use of ‘direct political agency’, in the attempt to categorize, tax, draft and
control the population, and to distribute political privileges and rights in
the manner it preferred. The Bolsheviks and the Politburo of the Com-
munist Party behaved in much the same manner, and for similar reasons.
On occasion, they seem to have tried to reinforce rather than reduce the
homogeneity of the categories into which they had divided the population,
and the demarcation between them. The social distance between managers
and workers, to take one example, had frequently offended workers before
1917 but collapsed during the October Revolution. Far from welcoming the
disappearance of this class-forming distinction, Lenin and Stalin did every-
thing they could to restore it. Lenin’s insistence on ‘one man management’
rather than any kind of workers’ control was the first step. Stalin continued
in this direction by insisting managers be both ‘red and expert’, meaning
both members of the Party and graduates of higher educational institutes.
He then encouraged engineers to resume wearing the uniforms that had
distinguished them under the old regime, and later decided that graduates,
should also be publicly recognizable by special lapel badges.164
The ‘direct political agency’ that really distinguished Soviet society,
therefore, was not that supposedly intended to create a classless society, of
which there was precious little, but that used to terrorize and silence civil
society, so that the categories into which the regime had divided the popu-
lation could never openly articulate their interests and emerge as classes.
Since the tsarist regime could never control civil society to the same degree,
it had to tolerate a certain dissonance between the official and non-official
vocabulary of social hierarchies, and to accept market-induced contra-

dictions of it, such as poverty-stricken nobles alongside fabulously wealthy
serfs. It had neither the means, nor perhaps the will, to impose its preferred
language of class.
In the late eighteenth century, sostoianie, meaning ‘condition’ and then
‘legal status group’, was used officially to classify the population into four
such groups: the nobility, clergy, townspeople and peasants. Sostoianie
remained, in formal governmental usage, the basic legal term until the end
of the tsarist regime. The Svod Zakanov, or Digest of Laws, published in
1835, also defined the rights and obligations of sosloviia, usually translated
as estates.165 Initially, Freeze explained, soslovie meant ‘society’, ‘com-
munity’ or ‘constituted body’, but in ordinary usage it slowly gathered
additional connotations ‘of corporateness, of a common culture, and of
caste-like endogamous exclusiveness.’ In 1847, the Academy of Sciences
Dictionary recognized these colloquial connotations, and defined a soslovie
as ‘a category of people with a specific occupation, distinguished from
others by their special rights and obligations.’ Soviet historians used the
term soslovie to describe the entire stratification system up to the Great
Reforms of Alexander II, and from that point on until October 1917 claimed
that Russian society was divided into classes, and they were therefore
able to fit it, to their own satisfaction, into the official Marxist schema of
feudalism, capitalism and socialism.
Freeze pointed out, however, that civil society never used the term
soslovie to refer to ‘vestiges of the feudal past’, or to an ordered and compre-
hensive framework of four estates. Far from declining, he thought that
sosloviia were actively evolving after the reforms of Alexander II. Advocates,
a wholly new occupation and product of those reforms were, for instance,
often described as a soslovie, and later on physicians sought to assert their
independence of the state by referring to their soslovie. The term was, as we
noted earlier, sometimes applied to merchants.166 Freeze thought soslovie
‘became the primary descriptive term for the social system in late Imperial
Russia’ in ordinary speech, and referred to ‘enormously complex congeries
with numerous distinct subcategories’ in the main, one suspects, of occu-
pation.167 It coexisted, however, with a variety of other colloquial terms
such as: raznochhintsy, which referred to the ever-increasing number of
people of no particular legal category; meshchanstvo the lowest category of
artisans, labourers and petty traders; and the ‘third element’ of education-
ally-qualified zemstvo employees. Wirtschafter sought to pin down these
and other social categories, but ‘the porous boundaries, indeterminate
definitions, flexible structures’ and ‘fluctuating identities and insecure legal
moorings’ of imperial Russian society made it impossible for her to do so.168
The Soviet regime was, by contrast, determined to prevent similar ‘porous
boundaries’ and ‘indeterminate definitions’ and any similar dissonance
between official and ordinary usage. It therefore decided to micro-manage
the distribution of rewards and privileges, and to enforce a monopoly of

the language of class, ensuring that distant, dissenting voices, like those of
Djilas and Orwell, that contradicted the official vocabulary were never
heard.169 The two Russias’ management of social stratification, we may con-
clude, differed in scope and consistency, and in the means of enforcing it,
which is a difference of degree rather than of kind.
Both regimes, one might notice, had to cope with the disruptive effects
of market forces. Since the tsarist regime never gave its merchant guilds
sufficient powers to protect themselves from the competition of tiaglo-
exempt groups, entrepreneurs emerged at all social levels, from dvoriane to
serf, and were themselves completely classless. The emancipation of the
serfs in 1862 gave more scope to market forces and some peasants were able
to become substantial landowners.170 The decomposition of the dvorianstvo
and its dispersal into other social categories also accelerated. When the
class of provincial landed gentry sought to arrest the advance of representa-
tive government, they urged the reinstatement of the old estate divisions of
the population that market forces had been dissolving, and the replace-
ment of the duma by a zemskii sobor, an assembly of sostoianiia or sosloviia.
Market forces threatened to work in the same disruptive manner under
the Soviet regime. Three of the prime agents of confusion in the official
stratification of the old regime were eliminated at a relatively early date:
entrepreneurs, kulaks or wealthy peasants, and self-assigned members of
the intelligentsia, but thereafter the regime still had to cope with the dis-
ruptive effect of market forces, since these were not, as the categorical dis-
tinction between capitalist and socialist regimes might lead one to think,
totally eliminated. After the brief enthusiasm for wage equalization, for
instance, income differentials were utilized as incentives. And these were
not, Lampert decided, entirely the result of a conscious political decision.
‘Even in the absence of a free labour market’, he observed, ‘there were
apparently strong “market” pressures towards greater differentiation in
wage and salary scales.’171 Shearer has similarly shown that in the early
1930s, even after collectivization was well under way, ‘the social, institu-
tional and economic dynamics that drove the industrial system defied
attempts by Stalinist leaders to impose their own order … Despite constant
attempts by higher political and administrative bodies, most factories and
trusts were forced to rely on their own devices to get supplies, secure labor,
and actually produce something. Networks of traders, recruiters and sub-
contractors arose out of and reinforced remnants of older commercial and
administrative practices.’172 The regime claimed, of course, that it con-
trolled and planned everything, and some observers believed them, but
reality was, Shearer observed, ‘rather different.’ Hence the ubiquitous tolka-
chi who in various imaginative ways reduced the frictions in the official
planning machine, perhaps even enabled it to continue, by negotiating
private deals between state enterprises. Khrushchev later legalized free
movement of industrial labour, and this, as Filtzer argued, ‘fundamentally

stamped the entire fabric of relations between workers and management
and between workers and political authorities … the ability of workers to
leave their jobs whenever they wished meant that the labour market once
again became a seller’s market. Workers could not be dismissed against
their will, yet they could come and go virtually as they pleased.’173
There was also a considerable market sector in Soviet agriculture. In 1930,
kolhozniks, their relatives and dependants and other rural workers were allowed
to keep private plots, just as they had been allowed to do so by their landlords
in pre-Reform Russia, and they were allowed to sell their products in local
markets. Their number grew steadily so that by 1973 there were, according
to Wädekin’s authoritative calculations, ‘fifty million small-scale producers’,
and they contributed, at the time, about 30% to the gross value of Soviet agri-
cultural output.174 There was also the submerged and illegal ‘black’ economy
that operated outside the socialist distribution of rewards.175 Moonlighting
and use of state equipment and supplies enabled ‘a kind of capitalism’, as
Willis put it, to flourish ‘at the lower end of the class scale, among taxi drivers,
chauffeurs, interior decorators, car mechanics, hairdressers.’176
No doubt, by comparison with capitalist countries, these are still rather
limited, interstitial forms of market relationship, so it may seem an entirely
reasonable simplification to define the Soviet regime for analytical purposes
by the absence of market relationships. Nevertheless, if we overlook the
fact that it was continuously engaged in suppressing market forces, and
policing their acceptable limits, we may also overlook the interesting ques-
tions why the ‘mix’ of direct administrative control and market distri-
bution of rewards and privileges stopped where it did, and why, given that
income differentials and progressive taxation are relatively easy to adminis-
ter, the Soviet regime did not rely exclusively on them to differentiate the
population just as it wished, from General Secretary of the Communist
Party down to the lowliest peasant, rather than micro-managing the dif-
ferences between strata. The most likely answer is that it was precisely
because income differentials alone were thought to be too uncertain, too
unpredictable and unreliable a means of differentiating the nomenklatura
from other citizens. They might have confused and undermined the officially-
designated social hierarchy. Some ‘insolent person’, a diligent, thrifty,
single worker perhaps, or a worker in the black economy, might somehow or
other lay their hands on a Chaika, even a Zil, the cars of the nomenklaturists.
And then what? They might obtain salutes from the police, or drive on the
special reserved lanes of the highway, and enjoy respect from other drivers,
to which they were not entitled, until their number plates gave them away
unless they had also managed to forge or buy those. This is not, by the way,
a fanciful possibility. It occasionally happened under Brezhnev.177
To prevent such anomalies and mistakes, and to make the official hier-
archy instantly recognizable and universally respected, the regime therefore
committed itself to the prodigious administrative effort of distinguishing

access to every kind of good and service, and reinforcing income differ-
entials by ‘direct political agency’ to ensure the official hierarchy was
stable, publicly recognized and respected.178 It was only towards the very
end of the regime that the privileges of the nomenklatura were increasingly
turned into cash, by taking advantage of the difference between official and
unofficial exchange rates, by establishing joint enterprises, by property
dealings, and by premature, negotiated privatizations, preceding those to
the general public. Some of the younger members of the nomenklatura were
then able to leapfrog their superiors. Outsiders were able to join the eco-
nomic elite, and market forces were able to undermine the officially
preferred stratification of Soviet society.179
The key therefore to understanding both the resemblances and the dif-
ferences in the stratification of the two Russias is the relationship between
the state and civil society, and it is not helpful to assume, as the Bolsheviks
hoped we might, that there was a categorical and comprehensive dis-
tinction between socialist and capitalist societies. The benefits of focusing
on the relationship between the state and civil society seem, however, to
be still greater when we consider the formation of classes on the other side
of the Berlin Wall, in capitalist societies.
5
Civil Society as Adversary and
Collaborator in France
On the grounds that comparison best proceeds by considering cases that

have much in common, we will next consider France, for in a number of
respects it comes closer to Russia than the other two capitalist societies we
will consider in that the French state made greater efforts to control or reg-
ulate organized interests in civil society than either the United States or
England. Marx once likened it to a boa constrictor coiled around ‘the living
civil society’. French civil society was, however, never terrorized or silenced
by this boa constrictor for very long. It intermittently rebelled, and on two
occasions, in 1830 and 1848, overthrew the regime and installed a new
one. On a third occasion, in Paris in 1871, it expelled the state apparatus
from its own capital, and for 72 days sought to devise a communal alter-
native. On each of these occasions, it contributed to the formation of a
class whose triumphs and tragedies have inspired both class analysts and
activists around the world more than any other – the French working class.
A proletariat that preceded industrialization
The most striking characteristic of this legendary class is that it appeared

long before widespread industrialization. Even in the very earliest stages of
industrialization in France during the July Monarchy (1830–1848), there
was already a certain ‘passion for the proletariat’, and workers were por-
trayed as prolétaires menaçants.1 In 1831, when there were still only a few
miles of railway track, and very few factories, Auguste Blanqui, the peren-
nial revolutionary, during the first of his many trials, put the case which
was to inspire Lenin, for a vanguard party to help the proletariat overthrow
their bourgeois oppressors. In the event, as Noiriel showed, ‘a genuine indus-
trial proletariat’ of life-long, full-time, and second-generation wage labour-
ers employed in large-scale manufacturing plants only emerged in France
on a significant scale before and after World War I, and their collective
actions only ‘entered French history’ in 1936, more than 100 years after the
proletaires menaçants of the July Monarchy.2
87
Marx and Engels claimed that they had seen ‘the first great battle …
fought between the classes that split modern society’ during the June Days
in Paris in 1848. Traugott has shown that they were imagining things since
the two sides in this ‘first great battle’ were indistinguishable in their class
backgrounds, both being overwhelmingly artisan.3 The main difference
between them was that the ‘revolutionary proletariat’ was drawn heavily
from the employees of the National Workshops, a job-creation programme
started only months before, but whose director had just been dismissed and
whose closure had been announced, while the ‘bourgeoisie’ and their
‘lumpenproletariat allies’ were soldiers of the Mobile Guard, a paid but vol-
unteer militia.4 Traugott’s restrained and reasonable conclusion was that we
should recognize the ‘decisive role of political and organizational variables
in explaining the course and outcome of collective action.’5
How are are we to explain the strange prematurity, and these strange pre-
monitions, of a class that was thought to have appeared before the con-
ditions that were supposed to create both it and its main adversary, even
existed? Many students of the French working class have directed our
attention to changes within corporately-regulated, artisanal forms of pro-
duction, but in a comparative study, with other cases on the table, one
inevitably approaches their work in a rather sceptical frame of mind. In
England, where capitalist means and relationships of production were more
advanced than in France, workers nevertheless lagged far behind the
French in terms of class consciousness and of militant collective action. If
we then look in the other direction, at Russia, we find a textile industry,
using the latest imported British machinery, ‘accommodated itself perfectly
well to serfdom’.6 Is there any relationship at all, one wonders, between the
means and the relations of production, and could either have any neces-
sary relationship with class formation?
For the moment, however, we may put such sceptical thoughts aside,
since the argument that changes in the corporate regulation of production
were decisive in the formation of the French working class has been sup-
ported by some outstanding studies of the French workplace. We will con-
sider three examples. The first, by Johnson, sought to document a ‘rapid
acceleration between 1750 and 1850 of objective proletarianization’ mean-
ing an ‘increase, both absolute and proportionate in the number of wage
labourers in a given population and their increasing domination by capital-
ists.’ He tracked changes among Parisian tailors and compared them with
those among woollen workers in the tiny mono-industrial city of Lodève,
with a total population in 1798 of just 7,200.7 Driven by the strong,
though uneven, demand for the products of its workshops, workers in
Lodève were far in advance of those of Paris. Some four decades before the
revolution, entrepreneur-fabricants in Lodève had ‘broken’ the guild insti-
tutions and regulations, and by the ‘meshing together of functionally sep-
arate crafts’ had created a proletariat in ‘a factory system without machines’.
Civil Society as Adversary and Collaborator in France 89
Under the Restored (1815–1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848),

workers in Lodève were therefore able to launch ‘a class struggle of epic
proportions’, involving numerous strikes over their pay and conditions,
and even to organize a general strike in 1845.
Over the decades following the revolution, Parisian tailors also experi-
enced ‘the full swing from a corporative or guild mode of production to an
industrial capitalist one’, as some master tailors increased the size of their
work forces, sub-divided their tasks, created new hierarchies of control and
of skill, and hired increasing numbers of unapprenticed home workers,
largely women, at half the wage of the journeymen who worked in their
shops. As in Lodève, these changes were accomplished ‘without the least
mechanization of the industry.’ So-called confectionneurs who specialized in
the growing market for ready-made clothing, accelerated these changes in
the second quarter of the century, by producing clothing in standardized
sizes which they marketed through the new department stores. Journey-
men tailors ‘whose work and beings were being de-artisanized’ responded
to these changes with ‘typical trade union activity’, sometimes against their
bespoke masters, but in the late 1840s more often against the confection-
neurs. They ‘fused together in struggle…. joined one army in the working
class war against industrial capitalism’, alongside cabinetmakers, shoe-
makers, masons, carpenters and joiners and others who had been similarly
‘de-artisanized’. This Parisian ‘army in the class war’ only managed, how-
ever, to create a ‘powerful ideology of craft consciousness’ that hoped to
preserve the autonomy of their trades by producer-cooperatives. The other
army, the Lodèvois, were therefore ‘the “truer” proletarians’, and ‘more
exact prototypes of the modern industrial proletariat, harbingers as they
were of industrial unionism and class conscious socialism.’ Proletarian-
ization may, one must conclude, be hidden, and may proceed without
mechanization and without factories, so we should be wary of using aggre-
gate national indices of steam engines, factory employment and the like.
Aminzade, our second example, traced the ‘long and slow’ transforma-
tion of nineteenth-century Toulouse from a society divided by status dis-
tinctions and trade loyalties to one divided by class.8 This transformation
was ‘evidenced’, he thought, by the decline of compagnonnages, fraternities
of journeymen descended from craft guilds, and their replacement by
mutual benefit societies, secularized descendants of the confrèries of the
ancien régime but a more modern form of association which became ‘polit-
icized agents of class struggle.’9 Although these societies assumed some
of the welfare functions of the compagnonnages, they were less concerned,
Aminzade thought, with their rules to control entry to their trades or to
protect the wages and working conditions of their members, since they
‘usually’ drew their members from a variety of occupations, even from non-
manual and unskilled workers, and sought to promote ‘common identities
among members of different trades.10 In the 1840s, they responded to the
‘many appeals for working class unity’ which all came to fruition imme-
diately after the revolution in February 1848. They then formed a Sociètè des
travailleurs which aimed at the ‘prompt and complete fusion of all trades
(corps d’état) into a general association of workers.’11 Aminzade argued that
all these changes were ‘brought about by the rise of industrial capitalism’,
even though, as it happened, and as he showed, Toulouse was never ‘an
important centre of factory production’. Even by 1872 only 7.1% of the
labour force of the city was engaged in manufacturing, and its position as
a commercial centre steadily declined in the nineteenth century, in the
middle decades of which it suffered from both a ‘crisis of commercial
capital’ and a ‘flight of industrial capital’. Its industry therefore ‘remained
largely handicraft and small scale in character.’12
Although he could identify a number of changes within the artisan work-
shops of Toulouse similar to those Johnson identified among Parisian
tailors, the main reason why artisans in Toulouse assumed ‘new self-
identities based on the common position of wage labourer’ and became
‘actively involved participants in the class struggles of the period’ was the
threat to their livelihoods presented by northern industrial centres.13 Hence
it was the advance of industrial capitalism elsewhere that made Toulouse’s
artisans more class conscious, even more class conscious in fact than workers
in the industrial centres who had themselves been proletarianized. It was
not, as he put it, ‘among the most proletarianized workers that the solidar-
ities of class were strongest’, but rather among ‘artisanal workers who faced
the threat of proletarianization.’14 Since he readily acknowledged that the
manufacturing labour force ‘remained a very small segment of the French
population during the middle decades of the nineteenth century’, it would
appear that this ‘very small segment’ generated the class consciousness
of artisans across France. Since Toulouse also complained of English com-
petition, we may also infer that proletarianization across the Channel was
actually contributing to the class consciousness of French artisans.
Our third example is Sewell’s attempt to explain why ‘the political atti-
tudes and behaviour of the working class of Marseille were revolutionized’
after 1848. Unlike Toulouse, the city had grown rapidly over preceding
decades and included a small manufacturing sector which by 1866 had
grown to about a fifth of the labour force, so that the majority who
remained in the small-scale handicraft sector ‘could see the factory system
advancing menacingly before their eyes.’15 Nonetheless, his evidence did
not suggest that either the growth of manufacturing employment, or the
threat of its further advance, had much to do with the change in the polit-
ical affiliations and political activity of the working class, since artisan
trades were also expanding over this period, and in 1866 were still nearly
three times as large as the manufacturing sector. As far as he could discover,
there was also no ‘subtle process of proletarianization’ within the trades
over previous decades. Their workshops had not increased in size, their rate
of strikes had not increased, and though artisans’ purchasing power had
declined somewhat before mid-century, those who suffered most did not
participate in radical movements any more than those with above average
earnings. In any case, he also found that many of the city’s factory workers
‘retained strong resemblances to workers in the handicraft sector’ having
‘personal responsibility for the quality of their product, high levels of skill,
high wages, and a strong sense of pride and dignity.’16 So although there
was no subtle process of proletarianization, there was evidently one, to
coin a term, of ‘artisanization’ within factories. The proletariat of Marseille,
as Sewell defined it, consisted of a mere 17% of the labour force who were
employed in unskilled, insecure and low paid jobs, often impoverished, fre-
quently oppressed, and illiterate. In marked contrast to artisans, they were
poorly organized, if at all, incapable even of organizing strikes, and took
little part in the collective action of the working class.
Sewell suggested that the key factor explaining the conversion of workers
away from their monarchist and Catholic loyalties was the extremely high
rate of migration into the rapidly-growing city, and while some trades
remained exclusive, others were more open to the immigrants. It was among
these ‘open’ trades that conversion to republican and socialist causes was
most marked. Nearly half of the names on the police lists of activists came
from them, almost twice their share of the population as a whole. About a
quarter of those on these lists had ‘bourgeois’ occupations, and only 7%
came from exclusive trades, who were ‘relatively immune to republican
and socialist propaganda’, as were the proletariat. In sum, the economic
factor that mattered most was the rapid growth of the city, the ‘crisis of
expansion’ as Sewell called it, and the growing demand for the services
of some trades, and the resulting decline in their homogeneity and cultural
cohesion.17
These three studies all raised interesting questions about proletarian-
ization. It might proceed ‘without the least mechanization’, ‘without large
factories’, and even ‘without capital’, while in Marseille, it hardly affected
artisanal relations of production at all, and did not occur within the new
factories. In the end, however, they do not resolve doubts about explana-
tions of the formation of the French working class that rest on changes in
the relations or means of production. This is not because the three studies
identified different causal dynamics of class formation, but rather because,
as much as these alleged dynamics differed, the collective consciousness and
collective action of artisans in these cities somehow synchronized nation-
ally. Thus, although the woollen workers of Lodève had been ‘thrown
together by objective forces of industrial change and forged a unity of pur-
pose’ long before the backward tailors of Paris, the class solidarity of both
nonetheless ‘reached a climax at roughly the same time’, that is following
the revolution of February 1848.18 Likewise, Toulousan artisans suffering
from the effects of northern and British competition, transcended their
trade solidarity shortly after the same revolution, and only then formed
their first working class electoral association, the Société des Travailleurs, and
started to help each other during their strikes.19 And despite the fact that
Marseille’s artisans had not been subject to the same proletarianization as
those in Lodève, Paris or Toulouse, their ‘mass conversions to republican-
ism and socialism’ nonetheless occurred ‘above all in the wake of the revo-
lution of 1848’ and prompted them to mount an uprising in June of the
same year ‘in concert with’ that in Paris.20 One may, therefore, reasonably
conclude that the economic changes that supposedly encouraged class for-
mation, whatever they may be, do not in the end make much difference.
Be they as premature, as rapid and as immediate as those in Lodève, or
as slow-moving as those in Paris, or as far-removed as those in Toulouse, or
as selective as those in Marseille, the destination and time of arrival was
pretty much the same.
Aminzade later compared the workers of Toulouse, with those of St. Etienne
and Rouen through to 1871, still focusing on changes in the mode and
relations of production he sought ‘to map out each pattern of early capital-
ist industrialization and delineate the consequences for class conflict and
for divisions and solidarities within each city’s working class’.21 In the
event, his evidence showed that the most developed class consciousness
over this later period was to be found in the least capitalist city, still sleepy
Toulouse. It remained a city with many artisan workshops engaged in
urban household trades and had little large factory production, but never-
theless in 1871 it was the most revolutionary of the three and declared
a commune in sympathy with that in Paris. St. Etienne, which had a
more diverse urban economy with a traditional silk-ribbon industry, and
paternalistically-managed steel and mining firms, was the intermediate
case. It also declared a commune in 1871, though by Aminzade’s standards
was rather less revolutionary than Toulouse, since its commune was led by
radical republicans rather than by socialists. Economically dynamic, and
modern Rouen, by contrast, which was dominated by large textile factories,
and had created the real thing, a homogeneous, undifferentiated proletariat
was, however, led by conservative and liberal leaders. No commune was
declared in the city, and it must therefore be considered the least class con-
scious of the three. These inter-city variations, however, only remind us
of the inter-societal variations raised at the start of this discussion when
we wondered why England was backward relative to France. Now we may
wonder why Rouen was backward relative to Toulouse. If economic factors
are decisive, why should the most advanced economically be the least
advanced in terms of class formation?
In his retrospective view of Marseille over a similar period, Sewell
observed that the spread of republican and socialist attitudes among arti-
sans in the city ‘was certainly not a steady and linear development’, which
is what one might reasonably expect if these had been the result of eco-
nomic development. He identified three critical moments: ‘the first burst of

political activity coincided with the general unrest of the early 1830s’, the
second was the ‘mass conversions to republicanism and socialism … in the
wake of the revolution of 1848’, and the third occurred ‘in the politically
effervescent years of the late 1860s’, which led on to the declaration of a
commune in the city in concert with Paris in 1871. There is no reason to
think that Marseille’s bursts of class solidarity and class action were atypi-
cal, for these moments all coincided with national class mobilizations. Nor,
of course, is there any reason to suppose that they coincided with sudden
changes from artisanal to more ‘proletarianized’ forms of production, or
that French industry reverted to artisanal means of production from 1835
to 1848 or after Louis Napoleon’s coup in 1851 when trade forms of organ-
ization once more became the usual form of worker organization. Clearly,
the main factor explaining the transition from trade to class consciousness
was freedom of organization and action. All of these bursts coincided with
periods when workers were momentarily free, de facto or de jure, to organize
as they wished, namely, in the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830, in
the wake of the revolution of February 1848, and in ‘the politically efferves-
cent years of the late 1860s’ which were sparked by the semi-legalization of
trade unions and strikes in 1864 and of chambres syndicaux in 1868.
Political events were therefore critical steps in the formation of the French
working class, and if we wish to understand that process we must consider
workers not simply as victims, whose form of action was decided for them
by changes made by entrepreneurs in the mode and relations of produc-
tion, but as political actors making choices of their own in the light of the
opportunities open to them, and their available collective resources.
The social capital of the French working class
Three of these collective resources stand out. The first, and much the most
important, was the revolution itself, and French people’s memories or
images of it. In France, Tombs observed, class ‘derived meaning from the
Revolution … From the very beginning, the Revolution, and subsequently
its nineteenth century aftershocks were explained as class conflicts.’22
French working people did not therefore have to discover or invent a
working class, or to find a justification for it, since it already existed. They
had only to draw inspiration from its heroic role in the making of modern
France, and renew its struggle in the face of new forms of oppression, and
new Bastilles.
Memories of the revolution were not, moreover, simply ideas and images.
They were also scripts of class mobilization, and guides to a certain form of
political participation and protest, that were repeatedly validated, and
firmly institutionalized, over the course of the nineteenth century. What
might appear to an observer to be hastily assembled crowds, therefore had
a certain direction and agenda, even a routine. Early one February morning
in 1848 Tocqueville was struck by the way workers built barricades, felled
trees, ripped up paving stones, defaced insignia of the July Monarchy, in
preparation for a day of protest as if they had been choreographed. ‘The
men of the first revolution were’, he observed, ‘living in every mind, their
deeds and words present to every memory.’23 During the insurrection in
June he was sitting with other deputies in the National Assembly, when
armed men burst in, one of whom pointed his musket at him. Why, he
wondered to himself, was he not frightened by it, and decided, ‘That man’s
musket was loaded in 1793. He is not a fighting man. He is an actor repeat-
ing the gestures that he has seen in some picture of 1793.’24 In 1871, the
Paris Communards provided an astonishing demonstration of the instant
recall of the revolutionary script by mimicking the great revolution in numer-
ous ways: its calendar, its committee of public safety, its anti-clericalism, its
courts, newspapers and clubs. Rather little had to be added to bring it up to
date, and make it seem modern and socialist.
Cobb conveyed the liturgical character of these re-enactments by refer-
ring to the ‘revolutionary passion play’. Tombs elaborated his idea and
documented several performances of its six acts.25 However, to recognize
the contribution of revolutionary memory to the formation of the working
class we might also view it as a semi-organized form of political parti-
cipation and association, lying somewhere between a union or party and a
crowd. ‘Meetings’ were summoned by news of some perceived oppressive
act by the state, or by its inadequate response to widespread economic dis-
tress. They were invariably convened in public spaces, in front of the hôtel
de ville or another official building that symbolized state power, if possible
of sacred revolutionary memory. Meetings were open. Anyone could par-
ticipate, but their leaders were those who had already come to public attention
by their recent opposition to the government. The agenda was unspecific
and extremely general, and encapsulated in a few slogans, which preferably
resonated with terms of the original revolution. Meetings were closed either
with a concession or promise from a state official, or with muskets, batons,
arrests and trials, or just possibly, with the fall of the regime.
The most important characteristic of this form of political participation
in the present context is that it had no defined membership. Anyone with
a grievance against the regime, or some sympathy with those who had, could
participate, and this enabled ‘the working class’ to be extremely hetero-
geneous in composition, and on occasion, vast in scale. Marx noticed how
peasants, the petty bourgeoisie and the middle classes joined popular pro-
tests during the Restored and July Monarchies, and he liked to think that
they were ‘siding with the proletariat’ or ‘regrouping around the proletariat as
the decisive revolutionary force.’26 Whether they were or not, he overlooked
the state’s contribution to these coalitions. The legitimacy of both regimes
was strongly contested, and therefore supporters of previous regimes formed a
tacit, though temporary, freemasonry of opposition, and joined any protest

against them. Moreover, their constitutions divided the population into
those with full political and civil rights and those without them.27 Such
state-imposed class demarcations preceded and, it seems safe to say, had far
wider social significance than any distinctions that a handful of industrial
employers might have imposed on their employees. They only declined
in significance as the legitimacy of the Third Republic was established
by several elections with adult male suffrage, and as it went on to protect
freedoms of speech, of the press and of association.
The French working class were therefore the descendants of ‘the people’
who had played a heroic role in the great revolution. Les proletaires, Tombs
observed, ‘were usually seen as all those working for wages and hence
included peasants, teachers, clerks, journalists, and certainly left-wing intel-
lectuals’, ‘proletarians like me’ as Blanqui used to say. Newspapers of the
Paris Commune in 1871 spoke of the labouring bourgeoisie (la bourgeoisie
travailleuse) and the heroic proletariat fighting together to defend the
Republic. Indeed, the concept of the working class became so all-embracing,
that it was roughly synonymous with ‘all citizens’, or ‘all good people’ and
could readily be combined with rather nationalist and xenophobic sen-
timents. Who, then, was left to oppose it? Only ‘the oppressive State’,
Tombs suggested, along with ‘its overpaid lackeys, soldiers, policemen and
priests; the idle rich and the landlords.’28
Without reference to the revolutionary origins or pre-formation of the
working class, it would be difficult to understand why it preceded indus-
trialization, or many of the other characteristics for which it is best remem-
bered and honoured, and which distinguish it from every other working
class: why, for instance, it was able to mobilize on such a spectacular scale;
why its protests were commonly directed against the state, and why the
capital city was the scene of so many of its exemplary struggles, even though
Paris was far from being the centre of French industrialization. Its revo-
lutionary form of participation and protest, and the ecstatic moments of
struggle that it unleashed, is the single most remembered, and admired,
collective institution of the French working class. No foreign admirer has
ever found reason to commend its permanent class associations, or the
institutions which have enabled it to reproduce a distinctive class culture.
By contrast with the memory and script of revolutionary mobilization, the
other collective resources at the disposal of the French working class seem
extremely modest.
Regular association of those with like political views in political clubs was
one of them. Clubs also of course had first-class revolutionary credentials,
though over the course of the nineteenth century no political club was
ever able to create anything remotely comparable to the original Jacobin
Club’s national network of affiliates, or was ever allowed to try and do so.
Most of the time clubs could only operate in secret, under cover of mutual
benefit societies or producer co-operatives, apart from the brief intervals

when freedom of association was possible. One such interval occurred
between the fall of the July Monarchy in February 1848 and mid-April,
when more than 200 ‘open admission’ popular societies appeared in Paris
which, Amann estimated, attracted between 50,000–70,000 members out of
the city’s adult population of 400,000. Since laws against clubs had not
been repealed they ‘depended on official toleration and support’, and with
government funding nearly 150 of them united in a Club of Clubs. These
clubs saw themselves ‘as a training ground for popular democracy’, but in
the many elections that followed, for officers of the National Guard and for
the Constituent Assembly, they had, Amann thought, little discernible
impact. Their demonstrations were not particularly successful, and an
attempted insurrection in May by one of them was ‘botched’ and led to the
flight or arrest of its leaders. Their involvement in the June days was there-
fore ‘marginal’.29 Given the change in the complexion of government after
the national elections, ‘nothing much was left’ of the original 200 clubs.
A ‘handful’ re-emerged in September, but ‘without regaining political
influence’, and they were all suppressed in 1849. Some again reappeared
in 1851, to resist Louis Napoleon’s coup, after which they were again
suppressed.
Magraw surveyed the clubs in a number of other cities, including those
in the most ‘advanced’, the ‘red city’ of Lyon. More than 150 of them
appeared after February 1848, and they had some 8,000 members. Given
Lyon’s bitter labour conflicts in the early years of the July Monarchy, its
‘labour movement’ was, Magraw tells us, ‘precociously mature’ and workers
were ‘well aware that a considered political strategy was a prerequisite of
success’. ‘Labour leaders’, he says, tended to discourage violent protests,
though there were nonetheless a good number of them, and they worked,
with some success, in co-operation with the organized trades, to secure the
election of Republican and socialist candidates ‘of various tendencies’ both
locally and nationally. In that respect, however, the clubs of Lyon were
almost alone, and the failure of republicans and socialists nationally,
‘created tensions within the left’ in the city, Magraw argued, and their
clubs were ‘struggling to survive’, some under the cover of producer co-
operatives. They nonetheless were able to discourage their members from
following Paris and launching an insurrection during the June Days. They
were not therefore suppressed, and though under police surveillance, con-
tinued their electoral campaigning, again with some success, in the muni-
cipal elections in 1849. A short while later, however one militant club, the
Voraces, after hearing false rumours of the defeat of the French army in
Rome, decided that the moment was right to launch an insurrection
against the recently-elected government, and replace it by a ‘red republic’
in the city. Their march on the town hall attracted some 15,000 people,
but the troops in the garrison did not defect. Instead, they turned their
cannons on the insurgents’ barricades, killed 25 of them, arrested some

800, and dispersed the rest. After this ‘rash adventure’, as Magraw called
it, the city was placed in ‘a state of siege’, the remaining clubs were sup-
pressed, and ‘the Lyon left had largely been demobilized as an effective
political force’.30
Amann hailed the political clubs as ‘precursors of mass political parties’.
Magraw suggested that they ‘contributed to the modernization of repertoire
of French popular protest’, but their own evidence suggests that the clubs’
contribution to the later development of the working class was a minor
one. The very fact that there were so many of them suggests that doctrinal
or personal differences were more important than class solidarity. More-
over, they could hardly have helped to define the working class, since their
own class composition was somewhat mixed and uncertain. Amann thought
that their leaders ‘tended to be disproportionately of middle or lower-
middle class background’ but that ‘a working class rank and file committed
to a socially-oriented republic predominated in most of them.’ Magraw, by
some undisclosed means, decided that 70% of the members were working
class, but whatever the percentage was, they do not appear to have insti-
tutionalized links among working people, or generated much class solid-
arity, since they disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared. Nor do
they appear to have been particularly effective as secret societies since gov-
ernment informants could affirm their republican or socialist beliefs as con-
vincingly as anyone else, a point that the great conspirator Blanqui never
seems to have grasped. Moreover, any one of them might, like the Voraces
of Lyon, find the revolutionary form of protest irresistible, re-enact the
revolutionary script, and bring state retribution on them all.
Later evidence shows that the ‘repertoire of French popular protest’ never
developed into effective and durable nationally-organized associations and
political parties, even after their freedom of association was assured by the
Third Republic. In this respect, the most advanced working class of the cap-
italist world seems to have been among the more backward. Until the turn
of the century the ‘ostensibly class parties remained in fact socially hetero-
geneous, weak and spectacularly fragmented.’ Socialist parties and the
socialist electorate remained very small until the 1890s and even as the
SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière) made headway before
World War I, the votes and leaders of socialist parties did not come mainly
from workers. In the twentieth century, French political parties remained
‘numerous and divided’ and offered ‘a model of acute instability’, the
notable exception being the party that took as its model a Russian rather
than a French political club.31
A third, more significant collective resource, was the association based on
métier or trade. This had been much the most common form of association
among urban workers before the revolution, and remained the bedrock of
worker organization over the first three quarters of the nineteenth century
in the form of compagnonnage, or more importantly, the trade-based mutual

benefit society.32 It had certain in-built advantages over any other form of
association. It was based on interests that tended to be lifelong, was entered
only after a lengthy socialization, and the loyalty of its members was con-
tinuously reinforced by their everyday working relationships. As a result, it
was largely self-administered, able to survive fluctuations in the enthusiasm
or apathy of its members, and the attempts of either employers or the state,
to suppress it, since even if disbanded, it immediately began to rebuild
itself covertly on the next working day. Every account of French com-
munities in the first half of the nineteenth century draws attention to the
ubiquity of these societies. Sewell referred to ‘the avid sociability’ of Marseille’s
artisans and to the ‘dense network of overlapping formal and informal ties’
they created, and to the distinctive artisan sub-culture they sustained. Johnson
formed an impression of ‘an incredible network of professional, social and
familial links’ in Lodève, ‘all intertwined, that produced virtually instant-
aneous action when needed’ and ‘completely eluded police surveillance.’33
Neither Sewell nor Johnson, one might add, give the least hint of the
famed inability of the French to form voluntary associations.
Here then was a formidable collective resource, but considered simply as
contributors to the formation and mobilization of a working class, these
societies also have decided weaknesses, as the Bolsheviks noticed, and intel-
lectual friends of the working class everywhere else have frequently pointed
out. They are, to begin with, exclusive, and inconveniently provide no locus
standi for friends of the working class. Their primary interest is their own
trade and their obligations are to other members of it, not to members of
their class. Moreover, they sometimes quarrel with one another over their
jurisdictions and their status.34 Hence they seem to require some special
provocation or some special incentive to mobilize, or be mobilized, as a
class, such as when many trades suffer simultaneously, or when they face
a common threat, both of which happen of course, but are not routine
occurrences.
In France, trade societies had one additional, rather distinctive and debil-
itating weakness, for although they might be provoked to follow the revolu-
tionary script, they fell short of revolutionary ideals of political participation
and collective action. Along with other forms of intermediate association they
had in fact come under sustained ideological assault during the revolution
on the grounds that they were incompatible with its cardinal principles of
sovereignty of the people and of equality. After the abolition of the guilds,
some Paris journeymen societies re-organized, thinking that the Consti-
tuent Assembly was only attacking their masters. The then president of the
Jacobin Club made it clear, in the law that bears his name, the loi Le Chapelier
of 13–21 June, 1791, that they weren’t. Earlier and later revolutionary dec-
larations and constitutions repeatedly confirmed the same principle, and
consistently applied it to every form of occupational association whether
organized by professionals or journeymen.35 In sum, the two most durable

collective resources of French workers – the revolutionary tradition and the
trade society – were at odds with one another, and even irreconcilable.
The survival of trade societies therefore raise two questions. The first is
why they were able to continue at all despite the loi Le Chapelier and sub-
sequent prohibitions. But that is easy to answer since when describing their
in-built advantages we observed that they were better able to cope with
state repression than any other form of association. The second question
is rather more difficult. Why was it that they started to decline in the
later years of the Second Empire, and still more rapidly during the Third
Republic and then disappeared altogether? Putting this more generally, one
might ask why in an economy like that of France, which remained artisan-
based over a very long period, trade and craft did not remain the bedrock of
the working class organization through the late nineteenth and on through
the twentieth? If they remained central to the organization of French pro-
duction, why not to the organization of French labour? Why did they not
modernize together?
The common answer to these questions refers to the growth of large-scale
manufacturing industry from the end of the nineteenth century, but we
have already aired our doubts about looking at worker organization as an
automatic response to changes introduced by employers. Comparison with
England only reinforces them, as we have already observed. Although manu-
facturers there introduced mechanized, large-scale, capital-intensive methods
of production earlier, more rapidly, and more extensively, than in France,
English workers maintained their exclusive artisanal or trade basis of collec-
tive organization, commonly inventing new ‘crafts’ and trades within large-
scale manufacturing enterprises, a process of ‘artisanization’ similar to that
Sewell noticed in Marseille. They continued in this ‘backwards’ direction
right through the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth. One may
therefore infer that workers in the two countries were making a choice, and
that the means of production have nothing much to do with it. French
workers rejected what English workers hung on to, and they did so, one
can only assume, because they thought that revolution, which they either
remembered or had re-enacted, promised a more inspiring alternative than
the localized, piecemeal amelioration of their condition that the trade
societies offered.
Adaptation of their revolutionary script in the twentieth

century
This inspiring alternative briefly assumed an organized legal form in the

bourses du travail, the first of which was established in Paris in 1887. Funded
by the central government and by municipal councils anxious to attach
organized labour to the still fragile republic, they addressed a long-standing
artisan grievance against private recruitment agencies. The bourses spread

rapidly. In 1892 ten of them federated in a national association under the
leadership of anarchist-journalist Fernand Pelloutier, the head of the Paris
bourse. Although they provided job placement services and travel assistance
for those seeking work, Pelloutier and his militant staff saw their bourses as
something more, much more, as agencies of class solidarity and class strug-
gle. Pelloutier described the Paris bourse as a ‘gymnasium of revolution’.36
To this end, they ran libraries, evening classes and dispensaries, provided
medical insurance and legal advice, organized recreational activities, thea-
trical events, festivals, carnivals and conferences, but most important of
all they gave organizational, financial, and moral support to trade societies
who were invited to hold their meetings in their municipally-provided
facilities. In effect, therefore, the bourses became France’s first trade union
federation, the nerve centre of strikes, organizing publicity, speakers, pickets,
and strike funds and co-ordinating support among the trades. They were a
formidable class resource, though one established and funded by the state,
and therefore destined to disappear when the state decided it had had
enough of them.
While helping trade societies in the depressed fin de siècle years, the
bourses necessarily diverted their members’ attention away from the inter-
ests of their own trades and towards the greater cause of inter-trade class
solidarity. Their educational activities were intended, as Pelloutier put
it ‘éduquer pour révolter’, not to uphold trade apprenticeship rules, which
would in any case have required the collaboration of employers. The bourses
also had no interest in trade jurisdictions or inter-trade disputes, and none
at all in defending the distinction between skilled and unskilled workers.
Much the same was true of the other form of national federation of trade
unions, the Confédération Général du Travail (CGT) which was created in
1895, for it too hoped to unite workers for class struggle, and thought organ-
ization by region or by industry more appropriate for this purpose than
organization by métier. For a while these two forms of union federation
competed with one another, but in 1902, inspired by another anarchist-
journalist, Emile Pouget, deputy secretary and editor of the CGT’s paper,
the bourses became a part of the CGT.37
In 1906, at its Congress at Amiens, the CGT, along with representatives
of the bourses du travail issued a charter, a founding charter one might call
it, since it was to define the direction of the French labour movement over
subsequent generations. After acknowledging, in a rather perfunctory
manner, that one part of trade unions’ work is the improvement of workers
conditions ‘telles que la diminution des heures de travail, l’augmentation des
salaries, etc’, it concentrated on the other which it evidently considered of
far greater importance, namely ‘l’émancipation intégrale’ of the working class
‘qui ne peut réaliser que par l’expropriation capitaliste’ and was to be obtained
not by the ballot box but by means of a general strike.38 Since the charter
went on to assert the right both of trade unions and of individuals to act
outside ‘du groupement corporatif’’ we may assume that the 43 signatories
did not think trade societies had much to contribute to this task, even
though at least 24 of them were themselves craftsmen. They had, one must
assume, been converted to the higher cause of class struggle. Six of the
other signatories were officials of various bourses du travail. Apart from
Emile Pouget himself, the occupations of the remaining 13 are impossible
to ascertain. Few appear to have been semi-skilled or unskilled factory
workers, and it therefore seems unlikely that the decision in favour of a
new form of association could have been the result of the decline of arti-
sanal forms of production and the presence of a proletariat from large-scale
manufacturing plants.39 In any case, we know that there were at the time a
great many groupements corporatifs and that the traditional artisan work-
shops remained much the most unionized sector of the labour force for
several more decades, until both the public sector and of large-scale indus-
tries unionized in the 1930s.40
At Amiens in 1906, we may conclude, activist French workers made a
deliberate choice to turn their backs on the extensive national network of
chambres syndicaux, to discard the one collective resource that had served
French workers through all the repressive regimes that had followed the
revolution, and whose roots stretched far back into ancien régime, and opted
instead for the form of collective participation and protest legitimized by
la grande révolution and its several successors. The revolutionary script was
therefore ensured further re-enactments in the workplace. It is only by ref-
erence to it that we can make sense of the peculiarities of French working
class action in modern times.
To begin with, it enables us to understand why, though it was the first
working class to emerge, and though it engaged in more militant action,
and suffered more fatalities, than any other, it was never able to form
strong and durable national associations. Through to the end of nineteenth
century, and right through the twentieth century, France appears to have
been one of the least unionized labour forces in the western world with the
exception of brief peaks of enthusiasm during the Popular Front gov-
ernment 1936–37, and immediately following the Liberation of France in
1944.41 It was precisely these years through to the mid-1950s that Noiriel
described as ‘the apogee of a certain kind of working class culture’.
Thereafter, it began to decline and has continued to do so ever since. Cur-
rently, unions have organized 8.2% of the total labour force, and just
under 5% of the employees in the private companies that they hoped to
overthrow.42
This cannot be attributed to any supposed national characteristic since,
as we have already noticed, workers associations were ubiquitous in French
cities when they were organized by trade. This failure must therefore be due
to their decision to organize on the more ambitious and hazardous basis of
class, and to try and convert the enthusiasm they had experienced inter-
mittently on the streets into a permanent associational form. Unlike a
trade, however, a class cannot rely on an enduring lifelong interest of its
members. Its interests are likely to vary along with the circumstances of its
diverse members, of the economy and wider society and of the state. They
must therefore be a continuing subject of debate, and therefore of disagree-
ment, which may at times be irreconcilable. On three occasions, leaders of
the CGT disagreed amongst themselves about the implications of inter-
national events for the working class and split the confederation.43 Some
trade unions had in fact been less than enthusiastic about the goal ori-
ginally set out in the Amiens charter, and in 1919 formed their own fed-
eration Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens, though since this
similarly was based on belief, it also split.44 Some CGT members later decided
that their professional interests should after all take priority, most notably
teachers, who seceded in 1947 to form the Fédération de l’education nationale,
but it too later split.45
Hence while their protests could intermittently mobilize vast numbers,
unions could never translate this mass enthusiasm into permanent union
membership. Intending to unite the working class, they often wasted their
energies accusing each other of ‘class betrayal’ and competing for members
or battle honours, and therefore collectively recruited only a tiny minority
of the labour force. Moreover, their preferred form of action had adverse
consequences for the other goal that they had, rather perfunctorily, acknow-
ledged at Amiens, that of improving the working conditions of their mem-
bers. Since the latter entailed negotiation with employers, it could not
be readily combined with a strategy of direct action, and employers were
naturally unenthusiastic about negotiating with those calling for their ‘expro-
priation’. In any case, unions were themselves hopelessly ill-equipped to
participate in meaningful negotiations. They lacked the shopfloor organ-
ization which would force employers to the negotiation table, the shop-
floor savvy to bargain over the details of workplace organization, and they
could never deliver a binding agreement if they got there, since their revo-
lutionary commitment precluded no-strike agreements. Strikes were not
therefore a calculated endgame but depended, like their revolutionary
model, on an elusive climat social both in the workplace and beyond.
Collective bargaining was therefore rare, and strikes were seldom the
result of its breakdown. They had altogether different dynamic, reminis-
cent of revolutionary protests, often starting before any union vote or any
serious bargaining effort to negotiate had been undertaken, and even before
any demands had been formulated. Trade unions might then pose as their
leaders and organizers, but in reality often followed workers’ protests, and
retrospectively tried to identify the grievance that initially provoked the
disturbance. After studying more than one hundred years of strikes in France,
Shorter and Tilly wanted to contest the view that unions did not control or
organize strikes, on the grounds that they found strikes were more exten-
sive and frequent where workers were unionized. However, they were obliged
to admit that many strikes were neither planned by the unions, nor in fur-
therance of their declared aims. At one point, they likened French strikes to
bar room brawls, the union representative being the person who eventually
stands on a table and calls for order.46
In the end, of course, if strikers’ grievances were to be resolved, a response
of some kind was required from their employers, but in the absence of routine
collective bargaining, this could only be obtained, indirectly, by the inter-
vention of the state. Strikers and their unions therefore commonly directed
their fire against the state, the original target of their preferred revolution-
ary form of protest, rather than against employers who were the actual
cause of their members’ present distress. They typically opened, therefore,
with a commotion or manifestation in public spaces, in front of the pre-
fecture or other government buildings, rather than at their employers’
premises, and whenever possible raised the spectre of a revolutionary
assault against the public authority, in the hope that the state would then
compel employers to respond to their demands. Historical evidence sug-
gests this hope was often realized, and that the state frequently intervened
at their request and on their behalf, forcing employers to accede to some or
all of their demands.47
In this roundabout way, by protesting against and negotiating with state
officials, unions were able to improve the conditions of their members. It
was, however, a method that had enormous benefits for employers, firstly
because state intervention was an occasional rather than a routine occur-
rence. Secondly, and more importantly, because it left them free all the
while to organize their enterprises much as they wished, since the state was
no better equipped than the unions to intervene in the nitty-gritty of work-
place organization. Hence, by trying to organize and mobilize as a class the
‘revolutionary proletariat’ surrendered control of their immediate work
settings to their employers and managers. Numerous studies of all kinds of
French workplaces, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demon-
strate this point, especially those studies which compare them with English
workplaces where workers were unwilling to allow their employers and
managers any such freedom.48 We examine a number of these studies
below.
The legendary French working class has, one must conclude, in large
measure been formed and defined by its relationship with the state, which
has been, at different times, either its main adversary or main ally or both.
For the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, the state was pri-
marily its adversary, though indirectly the state was also extending the
boundaries of the working class and encouraging and institutionalizing a
certain form of class action by limiting freedom of association and expres-
sion of large sectors of the population. During its short life, the Provisional
Government of the Second Republic rendered more direct support to the

working class via the Luxembourg Commission, the Club of Clubs, and the
National Workshops.49 As we have already seen from Traugott’s research,
both ‘classes’ in ‘the first great battle … fought between the classes that
split modern society’ were in fact, organized and funded by the state. The
Third Republic began to assume the role of ally, first of all through the bourses
du travail, but then by intervening in labour disputes in the manner described
above, and this continued through the Fourth Republic and the first three
decades of the Fifth.50
It was the state, rather than the unions that sought to abandon the revo-
lutionary script. Following the election of a socialist government in 1981,
and the first socialist president in 1982, four lois Auroux sought to bring to
an end the roundabout method of negotiating through the state after
mobilizing working people as a class. By legally defining the ‘citizenship’
rights of employees to free expression, to organize, and to bargain collec-
tively on certain specified matters, the government hoped that unions would
direct their attention towards collective bargaining with those who had sup-
posedly been their prime adversaries all along, the bourgeoisie, their employers.
The first law included the provision that ‘unions should state their demands’,
which seems to foreign observers like a statement of the obvious, but in
France it was not so obvious, in fact rather rare.51
Employers initially feared that these laws would provoke militant mobil-
ization of employees, but his study of four plants in Grenoble persuaded
Smith that they actually aided the companies’ policies of employee inte-
gration, and created ‘new problems for the unions in that they implicate
militants more deeply in technical and legal issues such as health and safety,
working conditions and investment decisions.’ Unions at these plants pre-
ferred to continue in their traditional ways, and he found little change in
the amount of collective bargaining. In the three strikes he observed, they
played ‘a significant preparatory role’ by ‘mobilizing discontent’ through
their constant campaigns of sensibilisation, or raising awareness of the injus-
tices suffered by the working class. The strikes themselves, however, were
‘explosions, which they did not initiate or control’, though once underway,
they played a role in organizing and sustaining them.52
In 1992, Amadieu cited several studies which suggested that there had
been little change as collective bargaining, ‘whatever its subject, is not a
regular occurrence, although progress has been made since 1982; rather it is
an outcome, indeed one of the goals of industrial disputes.’ Moreover, it
‘carries little weight because it does not involve a commitment on the part
of representatives of the workforce.’ Both employers and unions, Amadieu
thought, still seemed determined to uphold their traditional adversarial
relationship, though this still did not involve any disagreements about the
organization of work or shopfloor grievances. Employers ‘consider organ-
izational changes to be one of their prerogatives’, and ‘unions tended to
agree with their employers in this respect’, and ‘considered that the organ-
ization of work was outside their sphere of influence.’ They therefore ‘have
little control over the processes of production, due’, Amadieu explained, ‘to
a lack of adequate coverage and a suitable organization of work (no system
of trades).’53 In 1997, a cross-national survey found that though French
trade unions had organized one of the lowest proportions of the labour
force in the industrial world, France nevertheless had, by far the highest
proportion of its labour force covered by ‘collective bargaining agreements’.
This is at first sight, a curious combination but entirely comprehensible
given the roundabout way in which unions may ‘negotiate with employ-
ers’.54 In 1997, we may assume, the state was continuing to perform its dual
adversary/ally role, and imposing ‘collective bargaining agreements’ on
employers on behalf of organized labour.
Finally, in 2002, two decades after the passage of the Auroux laws,
researchers at the European Observatory detected a change of direction,
which suggested that the laws might at last be having their intended effect,
and lessening unions’ inclination to treat industrial disputes as part of a
class struggle. In comparing wage bargaining throughout the industrial
world, it placed France, alone among continental European societies, along-
side Britain, and Japan and the United States, as a country with a high rate
of company-level bargaining.55 Commenting on these figures, Vincent and
Aksaz noted that ‘the most significant change over the last decade has been
the growth in company-level bargaining.’56 If this was really true of France,
and if it takes hold, it would mark the decline of the collective protest, and
the relationship with the state, that long defined the French working class.
Some quotes from the later reports of others whose business it is to moni-
tor contemporary industrial trends across Europe suggest, however, that we
should be cautious: ‘Frequently, the content of collective agreements is
merely a repackaging of the wording of general statutory frameworks … A
number of firms … still use the term “bargaining” for simply providing
information on management decisions to union delegates … there is
almost stagnation in the amount of bargaining … employers’ associations
and unions exert serious pressure on political parties and the government
to obtain through legislation what they cannot get through bargaining. …
In France, apart from working time, the organisation of work has not been
the subject of much bargaining and indeed, appears to be a difficult area on
which to negotiate.’57
Intellectuals appear in lieu of self-governing professionals
The French working class has frequently been portrayed as having been
cheated of the just rewards of their revolutionary exertions and sacrifices by
the class it wished to overthrow ‘the bourgeoisie’. It has proved, however,
extremely difficult to define this bourgeoisie, the supposed victors of every
revolution, as a class. Marx identified at least six bourgeoisies in his ana-

lysis of the period between the revolution in February 1848 and Louis
Napoleon’s coup in 1851, to which we might add the ‘working bourgeoisie’
welcomed by the communards.58 Looking at the nineteenth century as a
whole, Tombs found it ‘hard to think of a single issue on which the bour-
geoisie and only “the bourgeoisie” agreed, or a single interest they all shared.’
It is also hard to think of the associations and institutions which might
have helped them to form a class.59 The bourgeoisie was, he decided, ‘a cul-
tural creation’, and ‘one of the most potent of the nineteenth century.’60
Part of the difficulty is that many of those that one might suppose belonged
to it seem to have joined the all-embracing working class, and many of
those remaining seem anxious to distance themselves from it at all costs.
The French bourgeoisie evidently failed to generate a sense of class honour
to which its members might proudly lay claim. They all want to be artists,
Oscar Wilde once observed. Its virtues, whatever they might have been,
were far outweighed by a long list of well-publicized dishonourable charac-
teristics, headed by grasping materialism, poor taste, prejudice and narrow-
mindedness.61
In the social space between rulers and working class that an organized
bourgeoisie might have occupied, we can however observe three forms of
collective action, three kinds of collective loyalty, and three groups there-
fore, who can reasonably claim to have formed a class: intellectuals, who
emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, and continued through the
first half of the twentieth, a petty bourgeoisie of small businessmen of
all kinds including farmers that appeared in the 1950s and lasted for two
decades or so, and the cadres or middle-level white collar workers that
emerged shortly before World War II and continues to this day. However,
before considering each of them, it is worth considering why the emerging
band of professional occupations failed to develop the kind of corporate
institutions, manners and ethics which contributed so much to the struc-
ture and culture of the English middle class, that is to say, to try to under-
stand the non-appearance of a stable middle class in France before examining
the three classes that appeared in its place.
Only one French profession, that of advocates, was allowed to organize,
as a self-governing corporate body. The corporate institutions of all the others
were abolished, along with the organized trades, for reasons already men-
tioned, during the great revolution, and this was one revolutionary legacy
that all succeeding regimes were pleased to accept. None wished to encour-
age, or cope with, autonomous self-governing professions. When profes-
sional associations were finally legalized in 1892, the state had already usurped
the functions that self-governing professional bodies might have performed,
and provided alternative, bureaucratic career paths to security, prosperity
and public esteem for their members. These alternatives attracted sufficient
numbers in every profession, and usually divided them from their putative
colleagues who were self-employed, so that the chance of united profes-

sions recreating self-governing corporate institutions never occurred.
Advocates were the exception only because there were a fair number of
them amongst Napoleon’s advisers, and indeed were his collaborators in
what he considered his greatest achievement, his codes. Overcoming his
antipathy towards the profession, he eventually bowed to their pleas
and grudgingly allowed them to revive their orders and some of their pre-
revolutionary corporate institutions in 1810, while making sure that they
remained subject to state surveillance and intervention. Advocates consid-
ered these state controls on their autonomy extremely offensive to their
corporate honour, and continually sought to remove them, but did not man-
age to do so until the very last days of the Second Empire.62 Notaires might
perhaps be considered a marginal exception or perhaps a hybrid profession,
since the corporate institutions they had created under the ancien régime
were also re-established, and placed unambiguously under direct state control,
without the least pretence of any degree of corporate independence.63 Notaires,
however, were less inclined to think their corporate honour depended on
their independence from the state. On the contrary, they welcomed its pro-
tection. Rather than openly resisting state regulation, they quietly and
patiently undermined it from within, and over a very long period of time
converted ostensible state regulation into a de facto form of self-government.64
Engineers illustrate the more normal form of professionalization in
France. Their expertise was needed by revolutionary regimes at war, and
Napoleon’s military campaigns greatly increased the demand for their ser-
vices, prompting him to lay the foundations of a new form of profession:
entered by competitive, intellectually exacting, concours, years of disciplined,
militarized training in a grande école, followed by a lifetime career in one of
the grands corps of the public service.65 Given their Napoleonic associations,
the Restored Monarchy did not look on these schools with any particular
favour, so their graduates did not immediately enjoy privileged access to
power or any remarkable public prestige.66 Under the July Monarchy, how-
ever, they began their steady ascent, and under the Second Empire, both
the grandes écoles and grands corps finally came into their own, and acquired
an intellectual and social pre-eminence which has occasionally been chal-
lenged but which they have never lost. Harrigan caught them during their
ascent under the Second Empire, when the École Polytechnique and others
were seen ‘as avenues of social mobility to elites for those of rather mixed
social background, much as the legal profession had done in the eighteenth
century.’67 Grandes écoles proliferated under the Third, Fourth and Fifth
Republics.68
In the 1840s, students at the Ecole Centrale des arts et métiers, had repeatedly
sought to establish an association for all practicing engineers, that would,
whether consciously or not, have been similar to the professional institutions
of English civil and mechanical engineers. They were, however, discouraged
by their professors, and it was only during the heady days of the Second
Republic that they succeeded in convening an inaugural meeting. Although
this was open to all engineers, few non-centraliens attended, and while the
society they formed, the Société des Ingénieurs Civils de France survived, it
long remained de facto an alumni association of the Centrale.69 Alumni of
other schools organized on a similar basis. French engineers therefore had
little opportunity to assert their solidarity on the basis of their shared
knowledge and expertise as engineers. They remained stratified according
to the status of the school they had attended, that of the elite who had
attended one of the grandes écoles being confirmed by the status, income
and lifetime security that they enjoyed as serving members of the grands
corps that dominated the military and civil arms of the state. State engi-
neers were, therefore, almost the exact opposite of advocates. Everything
they most valued and enjoyed derived from the state, which controlled
their admission and training, provided the main avenues of advancement,
designated their rank, and guaranteed their rewards and status. Advocates,
by contrast, engaged in a long struggle to free themselves from state sur-
veillance, during which their corporate solidarity was continuously reaffirmed
and institutionalized. Since prosecutors were officials of the parquet, a state
bureaucracy, advocates could only appear, in criminal trials, against the
state. Their codes of ethics constantly reiterated their independence from
the state in every aspect of their working lives, and for this reason they
long declined to participate in any system of publicly-funded legal aid.70
Academics were obliged to follow the engineers’ rather than the advo-
cates’ path of professionalization. After Napoleon created his Imperial
University, to which every faculty in every university was subordinate, they
were organized as an official corps enseignant, enabling state officials to become
the ultimate arbiters of academic merit and success. When the institutions
Napoleon had established began to be properly funded and staffed after
1830, they revealed, in Fox’s words, a new ‘bureaucratic conception of
academic life’.71 Under the Second Empire it took hold completely. All pro-
fessors were then required to take an oath of allegiance to Louis Napoleon,
and especially over the years 1851–1863, an intellectual and political con-
formity was enforced by strict censorship of curricula, especially in public
lectures. Duruy, one of Napoleon III’s Ministers of Public Instruction, would
only sanction public lectures which dealt with subjects of a scientific or
literary nature that ‘fulfilled his twofold objective of providing useful and
morally improving information for the classes laborieuses’, and what he
called ‘an elegant and beneficial diversion for the classes elevées’. He and
his officials therefore carefully scrutinized applications to give lectures, and
later the transcripts of lectures that had actually been given. These reviews
generated much correspondence about the soundness of potential lecturers.
‘Professionalization’, Fox observed, ‘meant different things in different coun-
tries’. In French academic life, it evidently meant ‘a unified state corps of
universitaires’ who had continuous difficulties ‘reconciling notions of the

freedom and universality of science with the reality that they were the
scientists of the state.’72
Engineers were largely, and academics wholly, salaried professionals, but
the state also had a significant impact on professions with a large propor-
tion of fee-for-service practitioners, such as medicine, and on professions
that were still to be defined, such as accountants, and even on the pursuit
of expert knowledge by amateur members of voluntary societies. State hege-
mony over voluntary societies has been brilliantly dissected by Fox, but some
of the landmarks in the emergence of doctors and accountants as profes-
sions may be briefly identified.73
In the first national congress that doctors were allowed to hold after the
revolution, in 1845, a number immediately called for the reconstitution
of their ancient corporate institutions, but with a brusque reminder that
this was tantamount to a restoration of the ancien régime, their request was
ignored.74 They never subsequently organized as a self-regulating profession
on the basis of their shared expertise and experience, and remained sharply
divided between those who were, like advocates, entirely dependent on
private practice, and those who held an appointment in the state medical
schools, or held some kind of full or part-time public appointment. When
doctors were finally free to organize under a law of 1884, they still did not
unite as a profession, but preferred to follow the working class and organize
as trade unions, and like them often competed with one another to bring
pressure on the state to solve the various grievances that had preoccupied
them in previous years, such as the organization of medical education, the
competition from officiers de santé, the second class medical practitioners
created during the revolution, and the role of private medical insurers as
third parties to the traditional doctor-patient relationship.75
Accountants had no pre-revolutionary organizational roots. They emerged
in the late nineteenth century from diverse sources: from the clerks and book-
keepers who kept the accounts of commercial firms, and were usually trained
in their company’s office, from the very highest levels of the state adminis-
tration, in the Treasury and other departments, among specialized judges, and
the Conseil d’Etat which before 1867, had to approve the formation of every
société anonyme; and after the reform of company law of 1867, from the com-
missaires aux comptes, who were required to approve the accounts of public
companies.76 At this time, English accountants were similarly heterogeneous
and disorganized, but professional organization in the two countries soon
diverged radically because a company law in England, comparable in many
respects to that in France, prompted the diverse persons performing account-
ing functions to organize themselves, to elect representatives, to agree
on the specialized skills and ethical standards that should be required of all
accountants, and then to lobby for a royal charter to enable to become a
self-governing profession.77 Once the charter was obtained, they imposed
admission and training requirements, and enforced their standards on every-

one else who thereafter sought to practice as a ‘chartered accountant’.
In France, the reform of company law had no such effect. Accountants
remained scattered, sharply differentiated from one another, and unorganized.
Students at the École des Mines and other grandes écoles continued to be taught
some aspects of accountancy as a subsidiary part of their training, which prob-
ably explains why accountants have remained subordinate to engineers within
French enterprises ever since. Company chefs de comptabilité continued to train
their bookkeepers, and commissaires aux comptes continued to be chosen rather
casually by company presidents. As accountancy work expanded, it came to be
performed by a bewildering variety of persons calling themselves variously
inspecteur-comptable, expert-comptable, censuer-comptable, organisateur-comptable,
comptable-conseil, comptable-consultant etc, etc. While small learned societies
of accountants were occasionally formed, no organized body of practitioners
appeared to define and raise accounting standards, which long remained
the rather rudimentary ones included in the Code de Commerce. A nationally-
organized profession only began to emerge in 1942, when an educational
qualification for experts-comptable was required by the Vichy regime. After
World War II, this statute was confirmed by the Liberation Government, and
the profession of accountancy then slowly, very slowly, began to organize
nationally around this state-imposed educational requirement.
Architects might well be added to this list.78 Enough has been said, how-
ever, to show why the French middle class could not be organized around a
series of roughly comparable self-governing professions, upholding their
own admission and training requirements, elaborating their own rules of
ethics and etiquette, and making their own appeal to the public at large for
recognition and respect. The first of the three other distinctively French
classes that appeared in their place were les intellectuels, the closest com-
parable case being the intelligentsia of tsarist Russia we have already dis-
cussed, though that was far more durable and better organized than the
French proved to be. There have been only the palest equivalents to it in
either the United States or England.
Zola’s open letter J’Accuse to the president of the Republic on the 13th Jan-
uary 1898 is widely taken to mark the emergence of les intellectuels in their
modern form in France, and of the widespread public recognition of their
social and political presence. His letter ignited the Dreyfus affair, which cast a
pall over all the representative and legal institutions of the Third Republic,
whose legitimacy, never particularly glittering or robust, steadily declined
as l’Affaire unfolded. Zola’s prosecution, conviction and flight to England
provoked petitions with multiple signatories from the world of scholarship,
journalism and the arts. Such petitions and manifestos were not without pre-
revolutionary precedents, and they afterwards became one of the most dis-
tinctive forms of collective assembly and expression of intellectuals until their
demise after les événements of 1968. Charle has examined a number of them,
from both the left and right, amongst which were a plea for an imprisoned
trade unionist in 1911, for industrial co-operation in 1921, against Hitler’s anti-
semitism in 1933, for republican Spain in 1936, and nationalist intellectuals in
Spain in 1938, and those for and against Algerian independence in 1960.79
These indicate, as he puts it, that ‘the structure put in place at the beginning of
the century came into operation again on various other occasions between the
1920s and the end of the 1950s, and in roughly similar ways.’
One of the constant characteristics of these petitions was that their sig-
natories came from various disciplines and occupations, reminding them-
selves and their readers that they were rising above their petty professional
concerns in the service of a cause, and demonstrating that intellectuals
were an extra-professional or supra-professional community. Charle refers
to the collection of signatures for these public petitions as a ‘form of action’
and pointed out that, ‘it had the advantage that it did not challenge the
deep-seated individualism of the academic, and saved him from a long-
term organizational commitment.’ It may equally indicate that the signatories
had no ‘long-term organizational commitment’, and the same might be
said of the followers, the rank and file of the intellectual class, often stu-
dents, those who responded to their words, and participated in various
auxiliary activities to support them, such as public meetings, pamphlets
and posters, ad hoc associations and movements. Long-term organizational
commitments might, to put it another way around, have limited the like-
lihood of a class of intellectuals appearing at all.
After reviewing several empirical studies of French intellectuals, Collini
defined an intellectual as ‘someone of acknowledged standing in a creative or
scholarly activity who also speaks with authority on matters on which there
can be no experts’. He contrasted this with ‘the mere deployment of exper-
tise’, or ‘the application of a body of technical knowledge to social ques-
tions…’80 However, the number of ‘matters on which there can be no experts’,
about which intellectuals can therefore hold forth with authority, will tend to
be larger if the real experts lack any form of organization, if they do not hold
regular meetings, and if they do not have organized means of expressing their
views. Once they do, part of their routine everyday activity is precisely ‘the
mere deployment of expertise’ and ‘the application of a body of technical
knowledge to social questions…’ which would limit the opportunities for all-
purpose intellectuals, and undermine their authority. Both Charle and Collini
attributed the decline of French intellectuals in the 1960s to the emergence
and growth of organized professional specialties.
The emergence of cadres and of a lesser bourgeoisie
The second, distinctively French, class formation to take advantage of the

absence of rival forms of association and affiliation for middle class occu-
pations, that of cadres, made its first public appearance in a number of strikes
in the early 1930s.81 Boltanski has shown that they were then a vague,
elusive, contradictory collection of employees, defined variously, as salaried
employees, as those who exercised discipline within the firm, or as those
who relied on their educational capital or cultural patrimony rather than
inherited wealth, or simply as those who came between employers and
workers. Sometimes they were also defined by their supposed personality
traits, lifestyle or political opinions. They were held to be thrifty and pro-
ductive, and critical of both capitalism and Bolshevism. At this time, how-
ever, there was still no agreement about who could properly be included in
their number, or about what should be the basis or direction of their collec-
tive action. A multiplicity of competing, fragmenting and ephemeral com-
mittees, associations, federations, blocs, leagues, claimed to represent them.82
Some of these, however, thought that the ‘middle class’ was a more appro-
priate and inclusive basis of organization, while others, mainly consisting
of engineers, argued that ‘the professions’ were the strongest and most
instinctive basis of collective mobilization and collective action, but both
of these alternative bases of organization were destined to fall by the
wayside.
Several of the associations claiming to represent cadres sensed that the
crucial pre-condition for class organization was state recognition. They
were, however, excluded from the Matignon talks convened in 1936 to
settle the labour unrest across the country, and from the Agreement which
emanated from those talks and established state arbitration boards. After
the defeat of France in 1940, their leaders continued to press their case
for recognition on the officials of the Vichy regime established in non-
occupied France. Somewhat fortuitously, their aspirations happened to
coincide with the ideals of the ‘National Revolution’ which Pétain pro-
claimed, and which was based on the proposition that France had been
defeated only because it had become excessively egalitarian and indi-
vidualistic ever since the great revolution. This ‘National Revolution’ was
therefore intended to resuscitate group loyalties and to restore France’s
social cohesion. In the Charte du Travail which gave substance to these
ideals, and set out how the economy was henceforth to be organized, cadres
received their first official recognition. It was a start, but a class only began
to be ‘made’, Boltanski showed, when a new organization, the Confederation
Général des Cadres (CGC), successfully claimed, in the euphoria of Libera-
tion, that it was the rightful and sole heir of its many pre-war namesakes.
Cadres themselves had not in the meantime become any less vague, amor-
phous or ill-defined an occupational category, or any the less subject to
competing definitions than they had been in the 1930s.
In the immediate post-war years, the CGC made state recognition its pri-
mary goal, and successfully organized strikes in which it obtained recog-
nition as ‘the most representative union’ of cadres. It fought for and won,
for its disparate membership of salesmen, managers, engineers, supervisors
and technicians, advertising and marketing executives, representation on

social security, retirement and other state bodies established under the Parodi
Accords of 1945. It then obtained recognition from the state statistical service,
Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economique (INSEE). However,
CGC’s major breakthrough came as the representative of its members on the
boards responsible for organizing retirement benefits of various occupational
groups. Boltanski thought this ‘was the primary means of mobilizing the
group’s fairly heterogeneous membership.’ Support for the CGC’s retirement
plan ‘was, and to a certain extent still is, the major bond uniting a rather
diverse assortment of people and organizations.’ Participation in a retirement
plan for cadres then became the widely-accepted criterion for determining
whether an employee was a cadre or not.83
Having finally obtained these various forms of state recognition, the
CGC began to persuade other unions to recognize the existence of cadres as
a class, even though their Marxist ideology of the day told them it could
not exist. But now – lo and behold! – here were their representatives, sitting
beside them in negotiations with the state, so a class of cadres must exist!
Finally, even sociologists recognized their existence, and began conducting
inquiries into this new class. By the 1960s, they had become, Boltanski
observed, ‘the embodiment of modernity … the magnetic pole in dis-
cussions of class around which other groups arrayed themselves in ever-
widening circles.’84 By this time, their ‘middle class’ and ‘professional’ rivals
had dropped out of the race.85 The associations which claimed to represent
the ‘middle class’ splintered, disintegrated and never managed to establish
the kind of solid, durable, reasonably representative institutions to enable
them to be recognized by the state. The professions were, as ever, internally
divided, and the uniquely well-organized, but numerically tiny, orders of
advocates could not therefore form the basis of a class consisting of self-
governing professions.
The success of cadres led Boltanski to conclude that ‘boundaries between
groups do not spontaneously emerge … from different economic circum-
stances.’ They are not ‘natural’. On the contrary, ‘institutionalizing the
boundaries between groups is always a political issue’. Berger’s study of small
independent property owners, of farmers, shopkeepers, artisans and small
businessmen, which she called ‘the traditional middle classes’ in the mid-
twentieth century led her to a similar conclusion. She was puzzled by the fact
that, despite their economic and numerical decline after World War II, they
did not seem any the less cohesive, less powerful or less willing to engage in
collective action in the seventies. To explain this counter-intuitive outcome,
she argued that ‘their cohesion and power depended on a certain common
relationship to the state more than on common economic interests … What
stabilizes and hardens the distinctions between these groups and others in
society,’ she argued, ‘are political decisions and social perceptions and values.
Political crystallization of interest and value creates out of an economic
domain with rather weak elements of cohesion, a class with stable contours
and considerable potential for collective action. Politics not only firms up the
boundaries of class; it determines membership.’86
She illustrated this point by showing how various subsidies, legislative
protection and exemptions in the late sixties had contributed to the for-
mation of this class, a decree on profit-sharing, for instance, applied only to
companies with more than 100 employees, another on union representa-
tion only to firms with more than 50 employees, and another made special
tax credits available only to firms with a turnover of under 20 million
francs. All of these policies are, one may note, examples of the way in
which a state may help to form a class unintentionally, and while looking
in another direction. Market forces would have created only a shifting con-
tinuum between firms, but these political decisions divided them into ‘dis-
tinct and discontinuous segments.’ Berger went on to point out that none
of the collective movements representing this class were particularly good
in formulating coherent demands, indeed they are ‘most in their element
when conducting an all-out attack on the state’. There were, nonetheless,
marked changes over time in their preferred form of collective action, and
these can best be explained she thought, not by reference to changes in
their economic situation, but to changes in national political context.
Some were due to minor shifts in electoral fortunes, but one towered over
all the rest, being the major political transition of the period, that from the
Fourth to the Fifth Republic in 1958. This, she explained, constituted ‘a
massive transfer of power … out of parliamentary arenas and into bureau-
cratic ones’, with adverse consequences for those organizations which had
previously relied on their parliamentary influence, but brought new
strength to those which rested on expert staff trained in the same schools
as the bureaucrats.’87
The biggest casualty of this transition was the movement led by Pierre
Poujade, a bookseller-stationer from Lot, which had enjoyed considerable
support in the 1950s, having won almost 10% of the popular vote and
52 seats in the National Assembly in the last election of the Fourth Repub-
lic. Poujade always declined to make any specific demands, or to formulate
a programme, or to enter into negotiations with politicians and bureau-
crats, and instead organized mass rallies ‘to rescue republican institutions
from those sold out to trusts, foreign interest and corruption’, and to return
Parliament ‘to its original mission of defending the common people.’88
After the creation of the Fifth Republic, Poujade’s movement dis-
appeared, and leadership of the class was assumed some years later, in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, by Gérard Nicoud’s Comité d’information et de
Défense-Union Nationale des Travailleurs Indépendents (CID-UNATI) which
after violent protests on the streets, and the arrest and imprisonment of
many of its leaders, including Nicoud himself, formulated a list of specific
demands in the manner of a pressure group. After 1972 a steady stream of
concessions, ‘poured out of parliament’, to protect small shopkeepers

from supermarkets, to reform social security to the advantage of the self-
employed, to allow ‘pre-apprenticeship’ employment of children in the last
two years of their schooling, to fund compensation schemes for those affected
by competition, and to provide grants for commercial centres set aside for
small employers. These culminated in 1975 with an extremely favourable
tax reform. Nicoud, having been amnestied, could claim a spectacular
victory for his class, but in subsequent years, his movement also declined,
and was replaced by other organizations claiming to represent owners of
small and medium businesses, notably the Union des Chefs des Entreprise
(UN-ICER), formed by Léon Gingembre, long-time president of the Con-
fédération Générale des Petites et Moyennes Entreprises.89 The re-emergence of
these class associations was, Berger argues, the result of Giscard d’Estaing’s
neglect of the traditional middle classes as he attempted to woo the Left.
They responded to the perceived instability of the regime, by seeking, rather
like Poujade, ‘to aggregate and politicise diverse middle-class interests in a
broad-based movement.’90 Once the Union of the Left that had threatened
Giscard had collapsed, these movements also declined, as the government
again paid more attention to their members’ concerns.
The life-history of this class seems to have been extremely brief, and the ‘fit’
that Berger proposed between regime transition or Giscard’s manoeuvres, and
the organization and tactics of interest groups representing the ‘traditional
middle classes’ seems less than perfect. It is difficult, however, to quarrel
with her conclusion that their ‘surges of collective action’ are best explained
‘by political transitions and opportunities, rather than by changes in their
economic circumstances.’91
Has the Fifth Republic facilitated the formation of a ruling

class?
It remains to be seen if one final class formation, an upper or ruling class,

exists in France. Many observers have claimed that it does, and have often
drawn comparisons between it and the Soviet nomenklatura.92 Dogan insists
that it does not.93 His first point is beyond dispute, namely, that since the
great revolution ‘France has changed the foundations of the State eleven
times’, each time excluding ‘people in powerful and prestigious positions,
making room for newcomers. … There is not a single generation in modern
French history that has avoided the battle between rulers and ruled.’94 Each
of these regime transitions dispossessed a segment of the ruling political
leadership. He documented in some detail, the transition to the Fourth
Republic following World War II. ‘Overnight a new political class was born
from the Resistance movement’ which ‘had no ties with “capitalistic”
circles, not with the older State bureaucratic elites, nor with the old military
establishment, nor even with the religious elites.’95
He also presented evidence to show that only a small proportion, about

15%, of 8,000 of France’s political leaders since 1871 had relatives who
were themselves politicians of some distinction or political journalists. One
need not accept his assumption that ‘in a typical ruling class system the
rate of social reproduction would reach almost 100 per cent’, to accept his
conclusion that France ‘has not had a hereditary ruling class over several
generations.’ Deputies over this period were, he showed, being recruited
from wider social backgrounds.96
Whilst this evidence makes it clear that France could not have had a
hereditary ruling class since the revolution, or since the Paris Commune,
or since World War II, it does not quite eliminate the possibility that a
ruling class has been forming over the nearly 50 years since the last regime
transition, the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958. Moreover, some of
the constitutional changes it entailed might have made a critical difference,
since they increased the power of the executive, headed by a popularly-
elected president, at the expense of the legislature, and lessened the sep-
aration between the executive and legislative branches of government.
In these respects, it contrasts sharply with its two immediate predecessors.
The legislatures of the Third and Fourth Republics were too unruly and
unpredictable to contribute to the integration of a ruling class, and they
seem to have enjoyed humbling those who sought to exercise political
power.97 The legislatures of the Fifth Republic have been more disciplined
and less powerful, and therefore have had fewer opportunities either to
block the work of governments, or to overthrow them. Legislation has been
initiated primarily by the executive, and parliamentary control of the exec-
utive power ‘appears today as a theoretical legacy of constitutional history’,
so that the executive has a better chance of integrating a ruling class without
being continually disrupted by the elected representatives of the people.98
Many more of these representatives are themselves officials from the
grands corps, to which all senior civil servants belong, or their juniors. The
legislatures of the Third Republic were dominated by self-employed advo-
cates, who were still strong in the Fourth, though steadily overtaken by
union leaders, party militants and others. Civil servants were a minority in
both, but they seem to have come into their own in the Fifth.99 In 1993,
107 members of the National Assembly, or just short of one-fifth of the
total, were former civil servants, 91 of them ‘high civil servants’.100 This
figure, however, rather understates their influence, since senior civil servants
have dominated the governments of the Fifth Republic, of both right and
left, out of all proportion to their number in the Assembly. Of the 16 prime
ministers since 1958, 13 have been from the ‘high administration’, and
between 33% and 45% of their cabinet ministers have had the same back-
ground. All the major parties are dominated by senior fonctionnaires. The
Front National, as one keen observer of French political life put it, is now
the only party of les autres.101
The ascent of higher civil servants has been facilitated by the absence of
any constitutional requirement, or customary expectation of a separation
of powers, and of any inhibitions about possible conflicts of interest, that
would prevent civil servants running for elective office. If they win, the ser-
vice obligingly gives them leave of absence, during which they continue to
accumulate their pension rights, and if they lose they may immediately
return to their former employment. The judiciary are also civil servants,
and dependent on the Minister of Justice, a political appointee, for promo-
tion up the many steps of the bureaucratic ladder of the French judiciary.102
The ruling elites of the Fifth Republic therefore seem more integrated across
the three branches of government, and the emergence of a ruling class
centred on higher civil servants more likely than in the U.S. where a sep-
aration of powers is a constitutional principle, or even than the U.K. where
there is no such formal commitment, but where self-imposed conventions
prevent civil servants participating in party politics. The impression of a
particularly cohesive political elite is reinforced by the distinctively French
custom of cumul des mandats that allows elected offices to be held simulta-
neously at municipal, departmental, regional and national levels. Although
those appointed ministers in the government are required by Article 23
of the Constitution to abandon their elective offices at the national level,
as well as any public or private employment, they may keep their sub-
national ones. A number of prime ministers of the Fifth Republic such as
Chaban-Delmas, Mauroy, Fabius, Chirac, and Rocard, have therefore simul-
taneously been mayors of large cities, and simultaneously collecting their
salaries as both, while many members of the Assembly have been mayors
or regional, departmental or town councillors, or maybe all of them.103
Dogan’s answer to such suspicions is to point out that the political and eco-
nomic elites in France remain, as they always have been, quite independent
of one another.104 A list of the 500 richest people in France over the years
1996–2002 has only five or six names which are also on the list of the
500 people ‘holding the highest positions in politics’, which is even less
overlap than that of similar lists for 1920–1940. He then showed that there
was little overlap between these 500 richest people and the 500 most senior
civil servants, or the 500 managers of public corporations, or the 200 most
senior military officers, or 500 celebrities of various fields. He therefore con-
cluded that there was ‘a tectonic fissure isolating the capitalist elite from five
other elite categories. However, he did find ‘a large overlapping’ of somewhere
between 80–150 names, between the 500 richest persons and the 500 man-
agers of the greatest private corporations, but since these were not also on the
political lists, he felt able to conclude that ‘Theories of the “ruling class” or of
the “power elite” based on the assumption of a fusion between the “capitalist
class” and the other powerful elites, are not validated.’105
This evidence does not, however, quite resolve the matter. There must,
first of all, be some doubt whether the absence of overlapping names on
lists eliminates the possibilities of class solidarity between legislators, minis-

ters, functionaries, public and private enterprise managers. And the fact
that the 500 richest people in France are not also the most politically pow-
erful would be a telling consideration only if one defined a ruling class pri-
marily by property ownership.106 Many of France’s 500 richest people are,
one imagines, ex-entrepreneurs, or their widows, or investors and bankers,
or heads of small enterprises, in the service sector, or in real estate, and
therefore do not have much interest or opportunity to control other people’s
lives. The fact that there is mobility into all France’s elites is also less than
conclusive. Dogan thought that a ruling class should have a ‘social repro-
duction rate of 100%’, but by that standard it is doubtful whether a ruling
class has ever existed, anywhere. While it is no doubt true that families are
the most effective way of transmitting class values across generations, insti-
tutional forms of socialization can perform similar functions. If they could
not, classes could hardly co-exist with any social mobility. As it happens,
all but one of the classes considered thus far have been defined by their col-
lective action, rather than by their self-recruitment or ‘social reproduction
rate’, about which we in any case had no information. The exception was
the dvorianstvo, and while their titles were hereditary, their positions in the
imperial bureaucracy were not. If we insisted on a high reproduction rate to
define a class, we would certainly have to exclude the nomenklatura. When
first observed by Djilas, it was still in its first generation, and had been
repeatedly ravaged by Stalin’s purges, which were rather greater one sus-
pects than ‘the dozens of permutations of posts’ which follow the election
of a new president or a change of government in France, and which Dogan
thought would preclude the formation of a ruling class.107
It seems reasonable therefore to leave open the possibility that a ruling
class might be formed over a single generation, if they are appropriately
selected, trained and socialized, have recognized their own common interests,
have been able to occupy many or most of the positions which enable
them to command their fellow citizens, have erected barriers against intra-
generational mobility, and have established their right to rule both
in their own minds and in those of their subjects.108 This is more likely
to happen if those who occupy these powerful positions are able to take
advantage of long-standing and long-accepted institutional arrangements
that facilitate the formation of a class. The new class or nomenklatura of
Russia was, we found, constructed on old foundations, and it was therefore
not difficult to identify continuities with its predecessor. One of the reasons
why it was able to establish and assert itself was that Russian civil society
had been long accustomed to an arbitrary and merciless state, and had rather
little experience of pressure groups and public debate that might disturb its
prerogatives and institutions as a class. Hence if we wish to understand the
formation of any ruling class in France or anywhere else, it seems advisable
first to discover whether there are old foundations on which it might build.
In France there most certainly were. The relationship between the state
and private economic activity had proved spectacularly indifferent both to
the great revolution itself and to all 11 of the regime transitions mentioned by
Dogan.
A short history of a long relationship
State interest in private economic activity may be traced from a very early
point in French history. From the mid-sixteenth century on, there are hun-
dreds of acts, ordinances, decrees, edicts defining the jurisdiction of guilds,
the details of their internal government, and the procedures for settling
conflicts between members. These regulated workshop location and pro-
duction methods, where products were to be sold, the number of appren-
tices, the length of time they should serve, their working hours, their duties
to their masters and their masters’ towards them, the details of their ‘master-
piece’, that is the piece of work to be submitted before they could advance
to master. These powers far exceeded those asserted by English monarchs.109
The decision of Francis I in 1522 to convert the sale of office into a regular
system of public finance further increased royal involvement in guild affairs.110
In 1771, the so-called bureau des parties casuelles, which marketed and con-
ducted the sales, hit on the idea of selling guild masters’ hereditary rights
to their offices to which their predecessors had been elected, and hence
converting them into fully paid-up royal office-holders.
This relationship might be portrayed simply as a typical and expected
one between absolutist kings and the ramshackle corporate institutions of
an ancien régime, both of which were obsolescent, and soon to be swept
aside by the revolution and the emergence of a capitalist economy. This
would be a mistake. To begin with, French kings took steps to ensure that
these corporate institutions were not obsolescent, by assuming responsibil-
ity for improving the standards of their workmanship and by fostering new
arts and crafts. To that end, they brought to France a host of artists and
craftsmen from neighbouring countries, Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto
Cellini among them, and set up their own studios and workshops in manu-
factures royales, at Sèvres, Gobelins and Beauvais, St. Gobain, and the Louvre
itself, which in 1700, employed some 480 craftsmen along with their journey-
men and apprentices.111 French kings had, in other words, assumed respon-
sibility for developing technical knowledge, and for advancing technical
training. That responsibility was accepted by the French state after the
revolution, right through industrialization, and every regime transition.112
It continues to accept it to this day. France therefore usually heads inter-
national comparisons of formal school-based technical training.113 The
institutional forms have been modernized, but the underlying relation-
ship has been immune to changes of regime, and has proved to be as
modern and it was medieval. Moreover, if French kings were involved in a
pre-modern economy, they were equally involved in early capitalist endeav-

ours, by virtue of their ownership of all ores and mineral products in the
kingdom, and their exclusive right to extract them. They had also organ-
ized their own engineers, the corps des ponts et chaussées, and committed
them to the construction of roads, bridges and canals, to what we now call
the infrastructure of a capitalist economy. The Bourbons might reasonably
be recognized as the leading entrepreneurs of ancien régime France.
The revolution made little difference to the underlying relationship
between the state and economic activity. Napoleon’s commercial code of
1808, which itself drew heavily on that of Louis XV, ensured that the state
remained involved in all the public joint-stock enterprises.114 Every sociètè
anonyme had to be authorized by a decree of the conseil d’état, a lengthy
politicized process since the conseil had to approve the individual directors
personally, as well as the aims and methods of the proposed company, and
allowed the officials of the Ministries of the Interior, of Public Works and of
Foreign Affairs, of the Bank of France, as well as prefects and chambers of
commerce, to comment on the proposed activities of the company.115 In
considering applications to establish a sociètè anonyme, the conseil saw itself
as ‘the guardian of business probity’, and set itself completely against any
kind of industrial diversification. Insurance companies were, for instance,
allowed to insure against only one kind of risk. Industrial firms usually had
to confine themselves to one specified kind of activity, probably one sus-
pects, because their activities would then coincide with one or other min-
istry or department, which would make supervision of them easier. If the
conseil was uncertain about the activities of a firm, it would appoint a com-
missioner to their board, or even appoint the chief executive. After approval
was obtained, a sociètè anonyme continued to operate in a highly politicized
environment. Perhaps because of these obstacles, only 642 sociètès anonymes
were authorized between 1808 and 1867, and only 192 of these remained
in existence in 1867.116
Sociètès en commandite par actions, by contrast, were a simpler, and more
general alternative form of incorporation, and offered a means of circum-
venting many of these state restrictions, but these firms could not seek capital
from the general public, and they only provided limited liability to those
who took no part in the running of the company. In the 1830s, however,
commandites were the subject of a number of legislative enquiries. In 1856
they were made subject to rather strict state requirements, and permanently
supervised by so-called ‘councils of surveillance’. In the last years of the
Second Empire, 1868–1869, the procedure for establishing sociètès anonymes
was simplified and it was finally liberalized under the Third Republic, from
which time we may date truly general laws of incorporation. French entre-
preneurs were, however, never to be as free of the state as their ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ counterparts. The establishment of both forms of company remained a
lengthy bureaucratic process, and by all accounts remains so to this day.117
Moreover, both types of company remained under state surveillance, since

as we have seen, the French state did not entrust the monitoring of com-
pany performance to independent professionals who would report to share-
holders, but rather to commissaires aux comptes who were supposed to report
to the state, rather than to the shareholders or the stock market, about the
companies to which they were appointed.
The French state did not, however, merely regulate entrepreneurs. It per-
formed a much more important role, sharing the risks of large enterprises,
by subsidies, offering loans at low rates of interest, providing concessions
and other privileges. The close connection between state and private enter-
prise in the railway industry has been particularly well-documented by
Dobbin.118 Unaware that they were entering a new age of steam, or inaugu-
rating an industrial revolution, the engineers of the corps des ponts et chaussées
merely assumed the same leading role in the construction of railways, that
they had long performed in the building of roads, bridges and canals.
Private investors were invited to participate, but on terms set by the state.
The first railway charter, for a line to carry coal from the mines of St. Etienne
to Andrézieux, was granted by an ordinance of Louis XVIII in 1823. The line
was not therefore for public use, but its charter nonetheless included detailed
controls over every aspect of the company’s finance, engineering, prices and
administration, and ended by ordering that, on its completion, the prefect
of Loire should submit for the approval of the Minister of the Interior ‘a plan
of rules that will establish the procedures for loading, transport and unloading
of merchandise.’119 A law of 1842 built on this precedent and set out the
public/private relationship, which in essentials continued for the next cen-
tury, until the railroads were nationalized under the Sociètè Nationale des
Chemins de Fer (SNCF) in 1947.
There was not much doubt about who was the senior partner in this rela-
tionship. The state planned the route, purchased the right of way, graded
the land, built the bridges and tunnels, while private concessionaires received
operating franchises, which required them to lay the track, to erect the ter-
minals, and to purchase the rolling stock. The railway company charters,
which were written by state engineers, reminded private concessionaires that
they were performing a service for the state. One result was that standard-
ization of gauges, timetables and signalling proceeded much more rapidly
than in either Britain or the United States, and since state engineers were
involved in the management of every company, there were also, in Dobbin’s
view, ‘fewer problems of interfirm co-ordination.’ State controls did not
only deal with engineering design, technical issues and operating pro-
cedures. They also referred to the internal administrative structure of firms,
and sometimes reserved important company positions for ponts et chaussées
engineers, hence encouraging the transfer of senior civil servants into pri-
vate firms, a practice which later became known as pantouflage, and which
we discuss below.120 In 1852, the state decided to compulsorily merge smaller
railway companies and created six regional monopolies. In 1889, it also

regulated working hours and retirement ages of employees.
The end result, Dobbin concluded, was that private railway company
owners ‘exercised surprisingly little control over their own enterprises.’ Com-
paring them with British and American railway companies, he observed that
‘what most sets them aside is that at no time in the century did the French
policymakers view the railroads as properly private undertakings.’121 State
subsidies, state representatives on their boards, ex-state officials in their midst,
and the comprehensive state tutelage and controls, meant that French rail-
ways were semi-nationalized throughout their history. Indeed, since the sig-
nificant technical knowledge was monopolized by the engineers of the
corps des ponts et chaussées, railway expertise might be said to have been
nationalized, long before the track, rolling stock and stations were taken
back from the concessionaires in 1947.
Railways everywhere have entailed a degree of state involvement, but in
France the kind of relationship Dobbin described can be observed in many
other industries. Reid, for example, traced a similar degree of state involve-
ment in a coal, iron and steel enterprise in Decazeville, in the Aubin basin
of southwest France over some 250 years from 1692 to 1962, an historical
continuity which confirms how little the underlying public/private rela-
tionship had been changed by the great revolution or by any subsequent
regime transitions.122 Shonfield tracked some innovations in the relation-
ship after World War I, when, he observed that ‘the “mixed enterprise”
i.e. a partnership of private and public capital, made its debut on a large
scale’, especially in ‘branches of production where private capital would not
venture on its own.’ The older method had been to grant an exclusive con-
cession to a favoured firm, (as we have seen in the railways) but in both the
oil and chemical industries, the state became the joint owner along with
private interests. In the case of the Compagnie Française des Pétroles, for
instance, the state shared in the management and decided to make it ‘a
fighting company which would involve the national prestige in a struggle
for position with the established giants of the industry, American, British
and Dutch.’ In the case of the Crédit National, it ‘took another approach,
and rather than taking an equity stake, granted the bank a number of pri-
vileges, in return for the right of appointing all of its senior management.
After it had made these appointments, it was able to guide the direction of
the bank’s investments over a wide range of private industry. Thus, there
was, Shonfield observed, ‘a marked extension of public activity without any
doctrinal bias in favour of nationalization.’ 123
Since large French businesses had been dependent on les hauts fonctionnaires
from the start of industrialization, they had little need, or opportunity, to
organize amongst themselves, and to define and press their collective inter-
ests. Their activities were co-ordinated by the state, or perhaps by the former
members of the grands corps they all employed, rather than by each other as
members of trade or industrial associations. Napoleon had thought it would

be useful if all the businesses of the cities and departments were organized,
and Chambers of Commerce had therefore been established by law in 1802.
These, however, were quasi-state bodies, their members being appointed until
1901, and though representing the interests of local industry to the state,
they performed certain defined semi-public functions, and organized local
institutions, such as technical schools, warehouses, and stock exchanges.
To fund these functions, they were granted powers of local taxation.124 In
1864, when spontaneous voluntary associations were first partially legal-
ized, a Committee of Iron and Steel Manufacturers had been formed, and
had pioneered a new kind of independent industrial association. Similar
associations were subsequently formed in other industries. However, these
associations did not long remain independent of the state. After World War
I, the state became a party to many of them, extending and reinforcing
many of their agreements to divide markets and fix prices, and making
some of them compulsory.125
Ideologically, such associations suddenly assumed immense importance
after 1940, and German occupation of much of France, for reasons we have
already touched on. The Vichy regime’s ‘National Revolution’ sought to revive
the social cohesion of France, by dividing the entire economy into ‘profes-
sional families’, each of them headed by a tripartite Comité d’organisation,
of civil servants, employers and organized labour. Each Comité d’organ-
isation was to become the government of its industry, approving invest-
ment decisions, distributing raw materials, regulating prices and wages, and
resolving employment disputes, in keeping with the regime’s paternalist,
corporatist and communitarian vision.
In reality, as Jones has persuasively shown, the prior direct relationship
between big business and the state overrode the ‘professional families’. Big
businesses, in fact, often used the cover provided by their comité d’organisation
to restructure their industry in their own interests.126 The representatives of
trade unions on the comités were of little account, and were in any case divided
in their opposition to the regime, while the fonctionnaires who included the
later Socialist President, François Mitterand, declined to perform the impartial,
even-handed, supervisory role assigned to them. Thus, by default, big busi-
nessmen with the support of sympathetic ministers and officials, continued to
run their firms much as they always had done. Far from promoting the regu-
lation of the economy by corporatist trade associations, the Vichy regime only
prepared the way, after a bout of nationalizations immediately following the
Liberation, for the technocratic vision and planning institutions of the Fourth
Republic that followed. In short, the original relationship between the state
and major economic actors had outlasted defeat, occupation, the rhetoric of
Vichy’s National Revolution, and the Liberation.
The planning institutions of the Fourth Republic were remarkable, first of
all, for their independence from the National Assembly, that is to say, from
the elected representatives of civil society. The Commissariat au Plan was,

Shonfield pointed out, able to draw on public funds independently of the
annual budget, allowing it to by-pass parliament, as it thought necessary.
The first and third plans had been initiated by government decree, the
second only scrutinized by parliament when in its third year. The fourth
plan, however, was scrutinized by parliament before publication and
approved, though only as an outline ‘instrument of orientation.’ No pro-
vision was ever made for continuous parliamentary scrutiny. It was as if,
Shonfield observed, the planners thought the National Assembly might
express the will of the majority at a given moment, while the national plan
was ‘a truer, deeper expression of the interest of the nation in the economic
sphere. It was an expression of volunté générale, which was evidently con-
sidered superior to volunté de tous as expressed in elections, and of course
to the volunté du gouvernement.127 The plans also, one might add, by-passed
other organized interests in civil society, small businesses, trade asso-
ciations and organized labour, and were indifferent to their intermittent
militant class action.
After 1975, however, France’s rate of economic growth declined, unemploy-
ment increased, her balance of payments deteriorated, a number of her
much-vaunted industrial policies, such as the Plan Calcul, which was intended
to give French firms a leading place in international markets for computer
hardware and software, failed, despite massive state subsidies. Policies in
other sectors were no more successful. Nevertheless, some time elapsed
before it was thought that the overwhelming influence of the state on eco-
nomic activity might itself be responsible in some way for these problems.
Indeed, in 1981 a Socialist-Communist government was elected on a pledge
to undertake a ‘rupture with capitalism, and to lift state intervention to
new heights’, a pledge which, for two years, it gave every sign of keeping.128
Nationalization meant that 13 of the largest 20 French firms ended up as
state-owned, and 24% of the entire labour force came to work for the state.
Ambitious production targets were set for the declining coal and steel indus-
tries, and equally ambitious sectoral plans for chemicals, textiles, machine
tools, and other industries. Acting in the manner Shonfield so admired, the
SMEs of the machine tool industry were merged and expected to reconquer
the domestic market, and assume a position of global leadership. Five large
companies, Bull, Thomson, CGE, Matra and CGCT, were expected to lead
the charge into electronics, to create 80,000 jobs, and transform the balance
of payments deficit into a substantial surplus. Irrespective of the wishes
of the firms themselves, the state organized an exchange of their assets, so
that each specialized in one or two areas.
By 1983, however, it was clear that this reassertion of the traditional role of
the state was failing to produce the expected results. ‘National champions’
were falling well short of their planned goals. A recession loomed, while a
surge in the government deficit, and an adverse balance of payments, brought
pressure on the franc. Mitterand and the Socialist-Communist government

then faced the choice of either continuing with their interventionist pol-
icies, which would have entailed exchange controls, devaluation of the
franc, and temporary withdrawal from the European Monetary System (EMS),
or reversing course, and making severe cuts in public spending and reining
back state intervention in the economy. They decided on the latter, and
hence there was an abrupt turnaround of economic policy, perhaps the
greatest in the entire history of the country.129
Tested by a socialist U-turn and e-commerce
Planning was forgotten, aggressive nationalization gave way to cautious but

progressive privatization, state controls of investment to deregulated capital
markets, which the state encouraged by creating a Second Market, which
specialized in raising capital for SME’s, and by a little ‘big bang’ in 1988,
which ended the monopoly of brokerage houses on trading in bonds and
shares. State subsidies to national champions were also reduced, as were
foreign exchange controls. Political leaders and state officials adopted a
more ‘modest stance’, as Levy put it, and stopped forcing mergers, trying to
pick winners, and imposing uniform national prescriptions. Price controls
were removed in 1986, and labour markets freed, to some degree, by the
abolition of the 1974 requirement that labour inspectors should approve all
layoffs. At first glance, these reforms bore a considerable resemblance to the
contemporaneous reforms of Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the United
States.130
Appearances and rhetoric, however, were somewhat deceptive. Privat-
ization was not, as it was in Britain, a triumphant liberation of the spirit of
private enterprise, or an opportunity for popularizing share ownership. It
was a slower, more reluctant and more managed process, which ensured a
select group of investors, a noyau dur, would continue to control the newly-
privatized enterprises, and that the state did not completely lose control.131
The Minister of Finance therefore often fixed the price of the sale, chose
the new shareholders and composition of the new board, and prevented
foreigners from owning more than 20%. Partly-privatized public enter-
prises, and supposedly soon to be privatized enterprises, like Renault, Elec-
tricité de France, and France Telecom engaged in aggressive takeovers abroad
of foreign companies, presumably concerted by the state, as if they were
still national champions seeking to establish France’s place in the world,
before being obliged to become fully privatized when they might no longer
be so concerned with the national interest.
Privatization did not therefore break entirely with the past. ‘Quite the
contrary’, Bauer thought, ‘it fully illustrated the State’s interventionist tra-
dition and even reinforced it.’132 Lame duck enterprises were never treated
as brutally as in Britain, and the state commitment to VET was not reduced
in the least. More importantly, public spending did not decline, and there
was no attack on the welfare state. French policies had none of the extreme
competitive individualism of their British and American contemporaries.
Creating institutions that might enforce the proclaimed rules of market
competition, completely independently of ministerial intervention, proved
to be asking too much.133 Political leaders could not quite bring themselves
to denigrate state action in the same manner as Reagan or Thatcher.
Although, as Prime Minister in 1986–1988, Chirac sometimes used an
aggressive neo-liberal, Anglo-Saxon rhetoric which defined the state as the
problem, he later reverted to more familiar French ground, which Mitterand
had continued to occupy, despite his industrial policy U-turn. The political
identities of both major parties therefore still revolved around state leader-
ship. Even after the break with dirigisme, Levy remarked ‘the tradition of
state leadership could not be abandoned and French people could not be
persuaded to trust the market’ in the manner of the British or Americans.134
Levy did not, however, merely observe the change in central government
policies. He also sought to identify their consequences by interviews with
political and business leaders over the years 1990–1995 in Besançon and
St. Etienne. Whilst he found a ‘sea change’ in official rhetoric and demeanour,
he found that elements of the former dirigiste philosophy remained. Behind
most programmes lay the notion that ‘heads of small firms do not recog-
nize their own best interests, and that the state must therefore encourage
desirable practices’, and their encouragement ‘often included an element of
coercion’. Since this now involved SMEs, whereas the state had formerly
confined its attention to large firms, Levy decided that, paradoxically, ‘at
no point in French history has the state meddled in so many firms and
in so many prerogatives of management as under today’s ostensibly post-
dirigiste regime.’ Most local public initiatives that he observed limped
along, and rarely achieved their intended goals, mainly he thought, because
of a ‘lack of social capital’ that is, of a readiness of public officials and small
businessmen to work together for common ends. The idea that public officials
would recognize market opportunities better than entrepreneurs generated
a good deal of antipathy among the leaders of small and medium-sized
businesses in the two cities, and helps to explain why they were only reluc-
tant participants in public programmes.135 Many of them had, one imagines,
once supported Poujade or Nicoud.
Many observers think, however, that technology is a more powerful
agent of change than the law. Social scientists have not been far behind
dotcom promoters in enthusiastically heralding a new kind of economy
and society that would emerge as a result of new communication techno-
logies, so it may be as well to notice that one of the paradigmatic examples
of the traditional relationship came from that sector – Minitel. This was
the first device in the world to combine the telephone and the computer
for everyday access to information and e-commerce, so it, rather than the
internet, might fairly be said to have inaugurated the age of e-commerce.136

It did so by means of a simple terminal with no ‘stand alone’ computer
power, which was provided free of charge to telephone subscribers by
the state telephone monopoly, France Télécom (FT). In effect, therefore, the
state was to provide the Télétel mainframe and every household in France
was to be given a peripheral Minitel.
Between 1983–1991, five million Minitels were distributed free of charge
to telephone subscribers, which by 1989 had given about 40% of the popu-
lation access to some 12,000 services. After some years of very rapid growth,
the internet began to provide a highly competitive alternative, and in the
mid-90s by most measures of Minitel use, business to business usage, ser-
vices to consumers, sales, hours of use and duration of calls, started to
flatten out or even decline.137 In 1997, M. Jospin, the Prime Minister,
observed ‘we have fallen behind’, and warned of ‘dire repercussions on
competitiveness and employment.’ He went on to propose a shift of Minitel
services to the internet, but this was far from throwing in the towel, as one
suspects any other government would have done. FT managers, with state
support, responded by devising an Internet Service Integré (ISI) to make the
Minitel compatible with the internet by means of a dedicated, simple and
cheap terminal which used internet language and presentation.138 Standards
of the ISI were developed by an open forum of service providers and of
hardware and software manufacturers. FT was to ‘pioneer the market by
launching new terminals’ (much cheaper than a PC, though not free) and
‘once they have set the ball rolling’, manufacturers were allowed to sell
competing terminals wherever, and at whatever prices they chose, as long
of course as they incorporated the agreed FT-devised ISI standards. In sum,
ISI was, and is, intended to encourage market competition and innovation,
while remaining under centralized FT management and co-ordination.139 In
more recent times, Minitel has been launched on an entirely new career as the
main instrument of French e-government administration and e-democracy,
allowing the payment of taxes, school registrations, inspection and license
renewals.140
National figures on R&D show that Minitel was not an exception. In
1987, there were 150 French firms with more than 50 research staff, and
these 150 firms, concentrated in a few industries in which the state was
already heavily involved – aerospace, armaments, nuclear power, oil, rail-
roads and telecommunications – received 90% of all direct state support
for research.141 Some of the remaining 10% may have ended up with
the 100 high-tech, research-based start-ups Mustar studied over the years
1984–1987, since by that time, as Levy pointed out, the state was reach-
ing down to smaller companies. It had provided the funds which enabled
60 of Mustar’s 100 researcher-entrepreneurs to develop the industrial appli-
cations of their research. The state had, Mustar observed, first created the
links between the world of research and the world of industry in France,
and its funding was far more important than that of venture capital firms,
who typically tended to help only after a start-up that had established con-
nections with the state. State subsidies, encouragement and advice, he
found, ‘play a determining role in the … creation of these firms … public
powers simultaneously play the role of initiator, launcher, and accom-
panist.’ Indeed, ‘anchoring to the state’ (les ancrages avec l’État) is one of the
essential conditions of their survival.’142
The domain of pantoufleurs
More than enough has been said to show despite all regime transitions,
despite fundamental technological innovations, despite apparent somer-
saults of ideology and policy, the long-standing relationship between French
public administrators and private economic elites has endured. Why? Why
should entrepreneurs have ever agreed to become dependent and sub-
ordinate partners in their own enterprises, and accept state leadership? And
one must assume they did accept it, because there has been little sign of
any collective resistance, at any time, on their part. If there had been we
would probably have been able to write more about the bourgeois class.
Businessmen did not demand the U-turn of 1983, or celebrate it as if they
had at long last been relieved from the unwanted embrace of the state.
Bourgeoisies are not supposed to be quite so pliable.
A few members of it were not.143 Considerable numbers had, however, been
persuaded, by some means, to accept the intellectual authority and leadership
of senior civil servants and ministers, to maintain harmonious working rela-
tionships with them, and to accept that this was the proper way of doing busi-
ness. Shonfield, writing in the 1960s, when planning institutions were at the
height of their fame and credibility, suggested that their acceptance had both
intellectual and institutional foundations. The main intellectual foundation
was, he thought, the long-standing belief, shared by civil servants and a good
proportion of businessmen alike, ‘that the effective conduct of a nation’s eco-
nomic life must depend on the concentration of power in the hands of a
small number of exceptionally able people, exercising foresight, judgement
and experience of a kind not possessed by the average successful man of busi-
ness.’ Both ‘the construction and the realization of the plan was’ therefore, ‘an
act of voluntary collusion’ between the ‘average successful man of business’
and the ‘exceptionally able people’ in the public service. He reasonably
inferred that it was voluntary because the powers of the Commissariat au Plan
were not precisely defined in law, and it continued to operate effectively
despite the many discrepancies between the planned targets and actual
outputs and the large amount of guesswork and ‘quasi-ritualistic’ figures
its plans often contained. At other times, he referred to ‘a conspiracy’ from
which emerged ‘a series of bargains between state officials and big businesses,
each of whom were extremely sensitive to the others’ interests.’144
The main institutional foundations of this collusion were, Shonfield sug-

gested, the grandes écoles which provided an advanced technocratic training
to all senior civil servants, as well as many leading politicians, and leaders
of large private firms. They were inclined, and able, to ‘collude’ and ‘con-
spire’ therefore because many of them had attended the same schools.
Supported by the long-established relationship between the state and
private industry, and the ‘long-standing belief’ in state direction, the
grandes écoles provided a stable institutional foundation on which a ruling
class might be built. They had survived, indeed flourished, through all 11
of the regime transitions noted by Dogan. The two young civil servants
who had first proposed Minitel in the late 1970s, like the engineers who
built the first railways, had been educated at one of them, as indeed had
the President who acted on their report, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. By
Bourdieu’s tally in 1996, there were over 80 of these schools.145 The
Conférence des grandes écoles currently lists 238, and defines them as ‘insti-
tutions of higher education and research, independent of the universities,
with rigorous entry requirements’, providing a ‘polyvalent and generalist
education’, based on close collaboration with les milieux economiques.146
They are all state or para-state institutions, often linked to particular minis-
tries or local governments, by whom they are financed and directed, and by
whom many of the best of their graduates will normally be employed,
though the greatest, and most celebrated of these schools are not linked to
any particular ministry, and their graduates may enter any of the five
grands corps.
At one point in the early nineteenth century, there was a chance that a
private initiative might create a rival institution, even a rival tradition, of
higher education. In 1829 the École centrale d’arts et metiers was created by
a small band of researchers and teachers, with the help of a like-minded
industrialist, who were openly critical of the excessively theoretical curri-
culum of the École polytechnique, and of its orientation to the requirements
of the state. Centrale was the first institution in Europe explicitly dedicated
to training industrial engineers, but whatever its founders’ original inten-
tions, it soon came to resemble the École polytechnique, albeit a little less
elitist, with rather less of a mathematical and scientific bias, less military
discipline and no halls of residence.147 In 1889, however, with the enthu-
siastic support of its private governing body, and of its alumni, the Ecole
centrale came under state control, and was subsequently recognized as one
of the grandes écoles. Seven years earlier, some members of the Paris Cham-
ber of Commerce had established another school the École des hautes études
commerciales (HEC), which they hoped would provide a more relevant train-
ing for commercial careers than Centrale had managed to do. However, it
evidently aspired to join the grandes écoles since it required its students
to wear military-style uniforms. Until after World War II, HEC provided a
rather specialized training in commercial law, accounting and finance,
rather than in subjects like corporate strategy, marketing and personnel of

more direct relevance to the actual management of private firms. Neither
of these institutions, therefore, could be said to have inaugurated a private,
or semi-private alternative to the recruitment policies, pedagogic methods,
atmosphere or status of the older state schools. The professional formation
of public and private elites did not, therefore, diverge markedly.
The leaders of large private firms continued to demonstrate their respect
for the state schools, by employing their graduates either immediately after
they had graduated, or more commonly after they had accumulated some
years’ experience in the public service, and inaugurated the mid-career
mobility, that came to be known as pantouflage (lit: slipperage, or putting
one’s feet up) apparently because in the early days of the practice it was
thought to be a move from arduous state duties to cushier private ones.
Pantouflage steadily increased through the second half of the nineteenth
century and during the twentieth, as more large companies emerged who
could afford to employ former members of the grands corps, and who senior
members of the corps deemed suitable as employers of their younger col-
leagues. In the first half of the nineteenth century, about 2% of polytechniciens
resigned their commissions upon graduation to enter private business. For
the class of 1918–1919, the proportion had climbed to 78.8%.148 It con-
tinued during the inter-war years, and after World War II, became a rather
normal career progression for members of the grands corps, and they tended
to move into the most dynamic industries of the day.149 Pantouflage occurs
in only one direction. No one seems to have thought that private business
experience would benefit the public sector.
One study after another has shown how pantoufleurs have extended their
monopoly of the public sector to the commanding heights of the private. In
1970 Granick found that all the chief executives of 35 nationalized firms were
graduates of grandes écoles, and none at all were merely university graduates,
while 65% of the most senior managers of 509 ‘prestigious’ large private firms
had been to grandes écoles and only 10% to universities.150 This finding
prompted him to distinguish French management from British, American and
Russian in all of which he found the force of pre-entrance qualifications to be
‘weak’, whereas French companies had what he called a ‘closed promotion’
character, meaning ‘the selection task has already been done at the moment
of a man’s entrance into the firm.’ It was ‘those with a previous government
career who travel the royal road in French management’, while ‘the oppor-
tunity for reaching the upper levels of management is extremely limited
for those who begin their careers as ordinary white collar employees or as
foremen, let alone for those who begin as manual workers.’151
In 1968–1969 Savage found that 72% of his sample of 291 firms with
1,000 or more employees were headed by graduates of grandes écoles.152
Morever, when he separated out the 19 large firms in his sample whose
CEO had arrived by a managerial route, rather than having founded the firm
themselves, he found that 93% were graduates of grandes écoles, and the over-
whelming majority of them, graduates of just three of these schools, École
polytechnique, École centrale and École des mines. Nearly 20 years later, in 1987,
Bauer and Bertin-Mouriot found, that 73.4% of the chief executives of the
top 200 firms in France were graduates of grandes écoles, of whom 51.5%
came from the elite schools, and the 21.9% from their lesser kin.153 They
found that the rate of pantouflage had accelerated sharply in the early 1980s,
that is to say, precisely at the moment when Mitterand was announcing his
great U-turn of economic policy. Entrenched institutions, however, have a
way of mocking political rhetoric. Their data showed that a rather larger
proportion of pantoufleurs were then being ‘helicoptered’ into private enter-
prises at a high level, after long experience in the public sector, while fewer
were entering as ‘mountaineers’ at a ‘low’ level, working their way up, and
learning about private industry as they did so.154
All of these studies also map the outer limits, and perhaps moving fron-
tier, of the domain of the pantoufleurs. In the ‘non-prestigious’ firms, in
Granick’s sample, meaning firms in the retail and cosmetics and food sectors,
‘only’ 35% of PD-Gs (Présidents Directeurs-Généraux) had been to grandes écoles
versus the 73% in the more prestigious firms. Savage found that ‘only’ 42% of
the chief executives of firms with under 200 employees had been to grandes
écoles, while those who had founded or inherited their firms had attended
lesser schools or none at all. Bauer and Bertin-Mouriot had found that that
while over 70% of the PD-Gs of the largest French manufacturing firms had
been to a grande école, the proportion among service firms was only about half
as large – 35% of the largest 24 service firms were headed by their graduates –
while in what they call the commercial sector (mass retailing, commodities,
travel, advertising) the proportion declined to less than 10% and they were
outnumbered five to one by entrepreneurs.155
Bourdieu spent more time than most in the borderlands of the pantou-
fleurs, and found that their dominance started to decline as the distance of
their firms from the state increased. There was ‘an opposition’, as he called
it, ‘between state bosses, placed at the head of large enterprises with strong
state ties, either large industrial companies (nationalized, mixed or depend-
ent in large part upon government contracts, or large banks), and the
private bosses, who are at the head of private banks and private industrial
and commercial companies that are smaller (relatively) and less closely tied
to the state.’156 The state bosses were more likely to come from families of
higher civil servants and professionals, and have ‘a great deal of academic
capital, as well as a great deal of social capital consisting of contacts they
inherit or accumulate in their passage through the civil service and minis-
terial cabinets’, and their entire careers are ‘placed under the sign of the
public maintained through important events of technocratic dialogue (state
business lunches, planning councils) and consecrated by highest official
decorations (Officer or Commander of the Légion d’Honneur)’. They often
have important responsibilities in the Conseil National du Patronat Française

(CNPF), the main employers’ association, and are seen as quasi-official, and
always as being ‘accommodating’ to the state, meaning, as Shonfield would
have put it, ready to collude and conspire. They meet at the Association des
Grandes Enterprises Françaises (AGREF), which was created in 1969 ‘to give
large companies the means to think as a group.’ They often sat on the boards
of directors of the top 25 companies, were trustees of higher education
institutions, especially the grandes écoles, and shunned local responsibilities.
As he moved away from the larger private companies with links to the
state, he found that the amount of higher education of PD-Gs fell, along
with the size of company, ‘the most striking opposition being commercial
or corporate heads whose entire career has been in the family business, and
who had no higher education at all.’ PD-Gs of blue collar or white collar
origins were much less likely to have spent any time in the public service,
and more likely to have spent their entire careers in the private sector. They
were also less likely to be on boards of other companies, rather suggesting
that inter-firm links were themselves dependent on the state.157 These
‘private bosses’ had ‘many reservations about and often scorn for politics
and politicians, public service and public servants, and lacking the dis-
position and connections that favour exchanges with politicians and higher
civil servants, rely (not without some hesitation) on appointed spokes-
people, and limit their political action to the level of local institutions, over
which they often exercise complete control.’ But they were ‘rooted in the
regions’, and ‘never hold positions outside the economic field.’ Hence, the
significant fissure that Bourdieu identified was not between political and
economic elites, nor between the public and private firms, but between the
state and large private firms connected to it, and smaller, entrepreneurial or
family-owned firms, whose managers have not attended grandes écoles or
had any experience in the grands corps.
Bourdieu’s analysis, like most of those cited, concentrated on manufacturing
industry, but Kadushin’s analysis of France’s financial elite showed that
‘large private sector (financial) firms with long-standing relationships with
the state recruit via pantouflage like their industrial counterparts.’ The French
financial system, Kadushin concluded, ‘remained firmly in the hands of
upper class ENA graduates.’ It is, he observed, ‘much tighter than even the
British system … and is certainly tighter than the relatively diffuse American
elite system.’158 Survey data supports his conclusion.159 Birnbaum had earlier
detected a further linkage to yet another elite in that the pantouflage of
military officers to the financial sector was particularly marked.160
And their ‘control practices’
What, Therborn once asked, do the ruling class do when they rule? It is a
question we may ask of the pantoufleurs if they are to be considered as part
of such a class. Studies of French workplaces suggest that one thing they
did was to construct distinctive structures of control and stratification
within the firms to which they were appointed. Berlanstein charted one of
the earliest cases at the end of the nineteenth century, when graduates of
the state engineering schools took control of the Paris Gas Company from
the ‘idiosyncratic’ entrepreneurs who had created the firm and the indus-
try.161 As they did so, the Company became more centralized, its manager-
ial hierarchy became, as he put it, one of ‘closed castes’, according to the
status of the school attended, and engineer-managers ‘inevitably looked to
engineers of the state corps to define their responsibilities and work
culture.’ Following ‘the officers of the corps’, they ‘eschewed specialization’
and ‘welcomed involvement in every aspect of supervision’, and demon-
strated their polyvalence by dealing not only with technical issues, but with
personnel, marketing, accounts and even legal matters.162
They also adopted a distinctive style of management. For instance, when
‘they were directly involved in decision-making, they posed as impersonal
authorities who could evaluate a matter with detachment.’ They also ‘asserted
a degree of independence from their immediate employer and identifying
with a larger scientific community’, though not Berlanstein quickly adds
‘that they had a chance to form an autonomous professional group with
individual careers as the focus of professional life.’ On the contrary, ‘state
engineers imparted a sense of comfort with bureaucratic procedures, life-
long commitments to the organization, and ambiguity about the morality
of the marketplace.’163 Over time, the careers of their subordinates, the
‘factory superintendents with 20 years experience’ who had had to watch
these newcomers ‘shoot past them’, came to emulate and resemble in some
respects the state engineers. Although their ‘long hard roads’ led only ‘to
the middle under the best of circumstances’, they came to forget ‘the hurly-
burly of the early years of the industry, jumping from one firm to another
as an attractive opening appeared’, and settled into stable lifelong careers,
advancing slowly by seniority. Even at the routine white collar level, ‘the
situation of the fonctionnaire served as an influential model’, which the com-
pany was reluctant to change even when the civil service itself began to
contemplate reform.164
Ethnographic studies conducted in French workplaces since World War II
picked up many of the same characteristics. Crozier was the first to do so. He
noted steep, and sharply stratified hierarchies, which prompted a ‘defensive
egalitarianism’ from every subordinate strata, as they sought to protect them-
selves against any possible discretionary interference by their superiors.165 This
in turn provoked increasing formalization of procedures, and a vicious circle
of bureaucratization of a kind that his studies of organizations in other indus-
trial societies suggested was uniquely French. However both of his research
sites were publicly-owned enterprises, and more telling evidence came from
Horowitz’s 1980 comparison of ‘control practices’ in 15 large to medium to
private French firms with matched British companies. He excluded all multi-
nationals to eliminate the possibility of cross-cultural contamination.166
There were marked differences. The British usually had a small central
headquarters staff which ‘only shaped policy decisions and acted as bankers
to subsidiary units and monitored their performance.’ De jure or de facto,
the typical British structure was that of a holding company, with sub-
sidiaries (or divisions) having their own boards of directors (or divisional
management committees), chaired by an executive from headquarters staff,
a structure which allowed for considerable autonomy and entrepreneurship
at the operational level. British CEOs saw themselves as trying to distribute
power throughout the organization and were generally quite happy that
they had done so. One British chief executive explained that ‘We expect
them to run their units without detailed direction.’ And another, that
‘When a problem arises we ask what are they going to do about it and
when; with 30 subsidiaries we cannot contribute to solve problems.’ The
British, Horovitz concluded, seem to be ‘more lenient and participative in
their leadership style … leaning towards autonomy and self-control, feeling
it better to stand as a trustee than a sentinel.’167
French firms by contrast ‘seem to be more … oriented towards control as
a means of policing operations and more inclined to concentrate control at
the top of the hierarchy … this reveals quite a tough management style,
oriented towards operational efficiency and pyramidal organisational set-
tings.’168 French firms were usually functionally organized with a large
central headquarters staff whose main task was to ‘keep the boss informed’,
to ‘watch operations’, and more of their decisions, such as purchasing,
therefore remained centralized. French chief executives ‘look at more
things more often than their British counterparts’, and ‘committee man-
agement was scarce … leaving the chief executive as a “one man show” to
make many final decisions especially when problems arose between func-
tions.’169 They were likely to receive more frequent information than their
British counterparts, mostly based on past performance, almost always quan-
titative, and more sales and production oriented.’ Most of this information
comes from their central staff.’170
French chief executives, Horovitz pointed out, tended to ‘come from the
technical side … such executives are naturally inclined to pay more atten-
tion to what they know best, which is production.’ They are ‘more involved
in operational matters than their British counterparts, and there is closer
control of production matters … a more detailed inflow of operational
information on product, profit and departmental costs for each unit to
central office…’171 The French CEOs ‘want to make sure they are informed
of what is going on’, while the British ‘want only to be warned of unusual
matters.’ In France, the financial controller will ‘surprisingly … often come
from engineering: in this case, he is likely to look for heavy, computer-
based, information systems.’
However, the most compelling and detailed account of the internal stra-
tification of private French firms, by Ishii, et al., in the series of Aix-Osaka
studies in the mid-90s, emphasized the importance of schools as the trans-
mission agent.172 They compared reasonably matched large chemical, elec-
trical engineering and machine tool plants in France and Japan, and decided
that the demarcated horizontal strata they observed within their French
firms were ‘externally determined’, or ‘a priori’, and were ‘imported’ directly
from the school system. French firms had therefore ‘surrendered’ to the
educational system their freedom to determine the ability and merit of
their own personnel, not only at the most senior level, but throughout their
companies. Having accepted this external validation of their employees,
they thereafter paid less attention to assessing their performance according
to their own criteria and their own specific requirements.
The French chemical company, for example, recruited graduates from the
grandes écoles, and immediately put them on an accelerated, signposted
route, which led to the top management positions, though a few of them
opted to remain in research.173 University graduates were treated much less
favourably. Even a doctorate, did not make them the equal of the grandes
écoles graduates. Ishii et al. reported a similar stratification at a lower level
in the French machine tool plants, where the technicians recruited from
technical schools occupied an intermediate position, and thereby blocked
the promotion possibilities of experienced workers and operators. There was,
they observed, ‘rather little movement from non-managerial into managerial
positions.’174
This imported stratification was often reinforced by laws or collective
agreements (negotiated with the state rather than employers), or both,
often of some antiquity, such as the collective agreement for the chemical
industry under the law of 10th July 1934, and the decree of 10th October
1937. These specified the kinds of educational establishments and univer-
sity qualifications that made one eligible to carry the title, and perform the
functions of, an engineer, or to exercise managerial authority over other
engineers. Such laws and collective agreements further pre-empted com-
pany decisions by setting out reference points and minimum salary levels,
which included coefficients for those with doctorates to compensate them
for their late entry to the firm.175 In a similar manner, in the French elec-
trical engineering plant, all personnel were categorized in accordance with
the classification system laid down in the collective agreement covering the
metal industry, supplemented by various company agreements. Together,
these ‘hierarchized’ various skill levels into three broad classes by formal
qualifications: tech BAC for manual workers, BAC+2 for technicians, and
a diploma or university degree, equivalent to BAC+5, for engineers and
managers.176
These formal, imported, a priori horizontal divisions were further elabo-
rated and reinforced, by the employees themselves, who might therefore be
said to have taken their cues about invidious class distinctions from the
state.177 Marginal differences on entry were elaborated within the company
into collective stereotypes of ability, outlook, ambition and temperament,
entrenched in distinctive sub-cultures, and reflected in the behaviour of
members of each strata or class. Engineers in the chemical firm, for instance,
considered themselves holders of scientific knowledge, as opposed to the
merely practical knowledge of their technicians. The self-taught ingénieur
maison was thought to lack the capacity to establish a relationship between
theoretical knowledge and knowledge of the product. One engineer observed
of his technicians ‘… they can only solve problems at a technical level, as
soon as a scientific reflection is required on the bibliography, patents,
No! … Me, I bring new ideas, based on scientific fact. They can master tech-
nical knowledge. The theory is my domain, at the practical they are better,
I leave it to them.’178 Not surprisingly perhaps, personal relations between
engineers and technicians were not close, and they did not, the research
team observed, eat together in the canteen.179
The division of labour in the chemical plant corresponded to these sup-
posed differences in intellectual ability and temperament. The engineer in
his office, rarely got his hands dirty, acted by procedures, drafts, ‘bibles’ of
various kinds, while the technician stayed at his workbench, communicat-
ing orally, and acting in a ‘do it yourself’ spirit. Qualified engineers were
somewhat uncomfortable when technicians confounded their expecta-
tions. They did not, for instance, much like to see their technicians spend-
ing time in the library.180 In the electrical engineering company, there was
a wide organizational, professional and social ‘gap’ between engineers who
were mobile, and technicians who remained in one plant, and one job. The
division between expert engineers and technicians reappeared in the design
phase of innovation, where engineers monopolized all the conceptual and
relational functions, while technicians were confined to the execution of
tasks.181 These distinctions generated continuous frictions and animosities.
They created ‘a sort of non-communication’, ‘an impermeable barrier’, a
‘lack of dialogue’ that ‘ruled out all direct co-operation’, and even ‘silent
struggles’, though none of these were documented.182
There is no reason to suppose that the distinctive relationships observed
in French firms were the product of their technologies, since they did not
exist in the matched Japanese firms. The only plausible explanation is that
their PD-Gs and senior managers preferred the kind of order and control
with which they were familiar, that had already identified and rewarded
their own talents, and that they were now able to impose in their private
workplaces. Their ability to do so, and to persuade their subordinates that
they too should act on the selfsame criteria of state-certified merit, and repro-
duce as far as they were able similar career paths, is a rather telling demon-
stration that they have exercised the kind of power that might reasonably
be ascribed to a ruling class.
Are they a mandarinate or a class?
The long-standing inter-connection between the state and large private

firms, and the elevated walkways that enable the graduates of a small number
of elite educational institutions to move from positions of at or near the
pinnacles of public power to comparable positions at or near the pinnacles
of private power may reasonably be seen as a platform for the construction
of a ruling class. It may well be that over previous generations the ‘period-
ical beheadings’ which followed regime transitions prevented a ruling class
making much of these possibilities. In any case, unruly and unpredictable
representative legislatures made the central task of ruling rather difficult.
The Fifth Republic, however, has ended the in-fighting between the polit-
ical elites, tamed the legislature, indeed constructed another walkway for
senior civil servants into it, and further integrated political and economic
power, an essential precondition for the formation of a ruling class. More-
over, it also seems, for the moment at least, to have brought regime changes
and sudden personnel ‘permutations’ to an end, and thereby much improved
the chances of a ruling class establishing itself.183
If we insist that a ruling class should be hereditary, should include all the
richest people in the country, should not have any inward social mobility,
should monopolize all the command positions, and that its members
should never compete with one another, then plainly a ruling class has not
formed in France. If, however, we adopt rather more reasonable criteria,
and think that a class may be formed when a recognizable small strata of
the population has distinguished itself from the rest of the population at
an early age, has received a privileged education and an indelible social-
ization and public identity, has advanced from a monopoly of public exec-
utive power both to dominate the legislative assembly which represents the
people as a whole and to occupy a broad swathe of positions exercising
private power, then the graduates of the grands corps appear to qualify, or at
the very least to have a class under construction.
Selection for entry to it begins with admission to the right lycée and
includes a degree of self-selection as well as parental support since they
must dedicate themselves to the gruelling courses preparing them for the
competitive national entry examinations, and distinguishing them from
their peers who take the easy route to universities. These examinations are
open, formally at least, to all French children, which is quite crucial to estab-
lishing their later authority, since they enable the victors of this national
competition to persuade themselves and others that they are France’s best
and brightest, and therefore entitled to the finest education that the state
can provide. Bourdieu described entry to these boarding, and often military-
style establishments, as ‘a vast consecration ritual’, which entails ‘a break
with all family ties’ and ‘transformation of an entire way of life.’ He could
quote many personal, and often affectionate, recollections of their fellow
hypotaupes or hypokhâgnes and former teachers, which suggested that these

preliminary courses and schools themselves generated life-long identities,
loyalties and networks.184 Since past graduates are often involved in the
teaching the stages and travaux pratiques they are able to ensure that their
‘entire way of life’ is conscientiously reproduced, and not undermined by
teachers with interests of their own.185
The best of their graduates then enter public service, and after some years
those who hope to enter the political elite must obtain promotion to a
ministerial cabinet, so that they may find a ‘godfather’ to guide their polit-
ical career. Dogan underlined the importance of this particular step, point-
ing out that ‘two thirds of the highest positions in the financial domain,
half of the prefects, the majority of the directors of State administration,
and the majority of the managers of public corporations have previously
passed through ministerial antechambers.’186 Others may either remain in
the public service and either sooner or later move sideways by pantouflage
into a public corporation, or to a large firm in the private sector, where
they may then proceed along the ‘closed promotion’ career paths to the
top. As they do so, they may expect help, every step of the way, from their
personal networks, which by many accounts they assiduously maintain
and utilize.187
Whether these networks link or unite members of a class of functionaries
is not so clear, for they are most likely to render assistance to alumni of
their own school, and to members of their own corps. Individual schools
and corps have been extremely jealous of their status relative to one ano-
ther. The long-standing rivalry between the technical and administrative
corps is well-known, and graduates of the schools are more commonly
referred to as les enarques, les X, les gadzarts etc rather than by any collective
class term. Les corpsards might seem appropriate, but it is not widely used.
When, however, the grandes écoles come under public attack, as they did in
the years before World War I, and again immediately after World War II,
and during les évènements of 1968, they appear to close ranks, and show
a certain consciousness of collective class interests.188 In a questionnaire
Suleiman administered to 120 members of three elite corps, 82% of them
preferred to describe their relationship with other corps as one of ‘profound
solidarity’, and only 13% described them in terms of ‘rivalry and conflicts’.189
How far this ‘profound solidarity’ might extend, we have no way of telling.
Bourdieu suggested that the similarity in their exacting admission require-
ments, pedagogic methods and vocational missions, privileged staff-student
ratios, special relationship with their sponsoring Ministry, and self and public
perception of the superiority of their credentials to those of mere univer-
sities, promoted a kind of ‘organic solidarity’ amongst the graduates of the
grandes écoles.190
It is also not clear whether they could be said to have recognized certain
class interests, or share a common class outlook, though they are them-
selves of course walking embodiments of a distinctive interpretation of

the ideal of les carrières ouverte aux talents. Talents that matter are only
possessed by a few, must be evident at an early age, can be measured by
examinations, and when cultivated in a certain kind of school become poly-
valent, trumping all specialized professional abilities and qualifications, and
entitling those who have them to command others in any kind of organ-
ized setting. They also seem to share, whatever their political affiliation, the
view that the public interest demands the management of market forces,
and hence transcend a political divide often thought to be found in all
capitalist democracies. They are especially hostile to one manifestation
of these forces, foreign takeovers, though this is an instance where it is
difficult to distinguish class from national values. Foreign takeovers, one
may only observe, pose a distinctive threat to the grands corps as a class,
since they threaten the pantouflage walkways to which they have grown
accustomed, perhaps also to the structures of control and stratification they
institutionalized in private firms over generations.191 The offer of state sup-
port to any large French company targeted by a foreign one is, however, so
instantaneous, and so effective, that it strongly suggests continuous ties
between senior managers and serving state officials. It also indicates, one
might add, that power and control are the main class interest, rather than
capital ownership. In 2005 foreigners, largely ‘Anglo-Saxon’, owned 61.4%
of all CAC-40 companies, even though no American or British company
has ever managed to take control a large French one.192 Bauer’s 1987 study
of wholly-owned subsidiaries of foreign companies tended to support this
line of argument, for though graduates of the grandes écoles were quite well
represented among their chief executives, only one of the 37 in his sample
had obtained his position along the walkway from the senior civil service
into senior management.193
Some doubts remain, therefore, about the class solidarity of the members
of the grands corps, and their shared recognition of their interests as a class.
They have no class-wide association but then, like the Soviet nomenklatura,
they are able to use state institutions as a class resource. And membership,
like that of the nomenklatura, is lifelong. Dogan rejected this analogy on the
grounds that the grands corps do not have a monopoly of political and eco-
nomic power, and occupy ‘only a preponderance … of the most powerful
positions in the economy, the State administration and high politics.’194 He
thought it would be more accurate to liken them to mandarins during the
Sung and Ming dynasties of China, on the grounds that they also were
recruited by scholarly examinations. However, this analogy anaesthetizes
rather than illuminates. Chinese mandarins never had to subordinate a
supposedly sovereign elected, democratic assembly, nor to colonize inde-
pendent sources of power in civil society, nor to convert them to their own
methods of governance, nor to transcend anything comparable to the
structural differentiation of modern society. His analogy rather underrates
the achievement of the grands corps in connecting various public elites with
those of a free, independent, and sometimes ferocious, civil society. Besides
it also diverts attention from the threat they represent. Mandarins are usually
portrayed as wise, kindly and gentle souls, self-effacing and without an ounce
of self-interest. Class seems to capture their common characteristics in a
more intelligible and neutral manner.
Dogan acknowledged that the position of the ‘mandarinate’ has ‘matured
during the last four decades’ and, since they have increasingly moved out
from their dominant position in public administration to become both
politicians and managers, that there is ‘a significant interpenetration at
the highest level of a significant number of higher state administrators,
executive managers heading the largest public corporations, and of power-
ful politicians.’195 It can, of course, only be a matter of opinion when such
‘maturity’ and ‘significant interpenetration’ might become a class. He sets
the bar at a rather high level so that even the Soviet nomenklatura might
have difficulty qualifying. Set a little lower France’s high functionaries
seem to qualify as a class. And what other word would describe them more
accurately than ruling?
6
Civil Society Acts Alone in the
United States
In both Soviet Russia and France, the relationship between the state and
civil society was defined in large measure by their revolutions, which were
therefore critical to understanding the careers of their classes. There is
no reason to suppose that the revolution which led to the creation of the
United States will prove any less important. We will therefore begin by
considering its peculiarities, and to do that, we must begin with a word
about colonial society.
Civil society restrains the state
Arendt pointed out, the first settlers in the colonies brought the ideal and
practice of self-government with them across the Atlantic.1 An active civil
society therefore emerged in every colony, whatever its original form of gov-
ernment: proprietorial, royal or chartered company. Some proprietors were
formally granted seemingly absolute powers, but it made little difference.2
In all of them, representative assemblies gradually accumulated powers at
the expense of their appointed governors. They had all been given the right
to initiate legislation, and modelling themselves on the House of Commons
in London, they used parliamentary manoeuvres to delimit the powers of
their governors, so that by the 1750s, they were all ‘more powerful than
their governors’, and the ‘one principle firmly established … was that of
government by the consent of the governed.’3 Along with it came strong
local government, freedom of association and an active civil society, as
demonstrated by chartered colleges, by the two emerging self-governing
professions of lawyers and physicians, by free churches and voluntary asso-
ciations of various kinds.
Jefferson’s reference in the Declaration of Independence to ‘a history of
repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the estab-
lishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States’ was, therefore, by any
historical or contemporary standard far-fetched, a wild exaggeration, a pol-
itical myth, necessary to rouse and mobilize a population less than wholly
141
persuaded of the case for independence. Subsequently, however, the myth

seems to have been instilled in every American child, is sometimes shared
by adults, including presidents, and encouraged them in the belief that
freedom might spring from the violent overthrow of a ‘tyrant’ and required
no social support or infrastructure whatever.4 In fact, the infrastructure pro-
vided by an organized and active civil society, preceded the revolution by a
considerable period. It therefore also preceded the formation of a national
state, indeed might be said to have summoned that state into existence,
and when it did so, it was careful to place strict limits on its powers. Clearly
such circumstances sharply differentiate the American Revolution from
both the Russian and French which were both terminated by authoritarian
rulers, who defined the meaning of the revolution, and the powers of the
post-revolutionary state over their civil societies. In America, both of these
tasks were performed by representatives of civil society, assembled in a con-
vention, and the constitution they devised only acquired legitimacy because it
was subsequently ratified by popular, and hotly-debated, referenda. America’s
post-revolutionary state was therefore surrounded by a vigilant, aroused,
often hyperactive, civil society that constitutionally prevented it from exer-
cising powers that had hitherto been thought to belong to all national
states.
The preface to any analysis of formation of classes in the United States is
therefore to note the limited powers granted under the constitution to this
new federal government. The very first article of that constitution, which
forbids the granting of any title of nobility, should not be overlooked, since
it eliminated the possibility of one class that had played a leading historical
role in two of our other societies, and an enduring one in the third, England.
The fact that the federal government was also granted no powers with respect
to education also seems especially important, since our French evidence
has already shown that educational institutions may make a critical contri-
bution to the process of class formation. A number of the founding fathers,
including George Washington, initially hoped that the federal government
might play a more active part in the education of citizens of the new repub-
lic. He tried to establish a University of the United States, but his wishes,
and his bequest to the putative institution, were ignored.5 Trow and Rothblatt
reasonably suggested that, if it had come to fruition alongside analogous
capstone institutions in the states, it might well have been the means of
recruiting, training and defining an ‘establishment’ or ruling class.6 But it
didn’t.
A third major limitation on the powers of the federal government was
with regard to economic activity, its powers being limited to questions of
foreign trade and interstate commerce, the second of which was then of
minor importance. For nearly a century, therefore, until the interstate com-
merce became a ‘live’ clause of the constitution, the federal government
was not directly involved in the regulation of domestic economic activity.
Civil Society Acts Alone in the United States 143
Moreover, since the federal government had not been granted any powers
of incorporation, it could not award charters to company promoters, and
by that means sponsor favoured, well-placed petitioners, and possibly assist
the formation of a business elite or class. Andrew Jackson interpreted the
limited rights granted to the federal government in this respect more
strictly than his predecessors. He thought they had been wrong to make an
exception of the Bank of the United States, despite a decision of the United
States Supreme Court to the contrary. In 1832 he therefore vetoed the
bill to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, ‘a con-
trivance’, as he put it in his veto ‘to make the rich richer and the poor
poorer’. In so doing he reduced the opportunities for the federal govern-
ment to sponsor or encourage the formation of a financial elite alongside
the political one.7
In one matter related to domestic economic activity, however, the power
of the federal government was not delegated to the states – the right to
issue patents. It is of some interest to observe how the federal government
chose to exercise the unqualified and unquestioned power granted to it
by comparison with its British counterpart. From the very beginning, the
U.S. Patent Office sought to limit the possibility that patentees would
be drawn disproportionately from one class of the population. It therefore
rapidly decentralized and simplified its procedures, and in case the cost
might discourage any applicants, paid the postage of them all.8 Its guiding
principle was that talented inventors might appear anywhere and every-
where, and that its task was to record their achievements, and thereby
protect their rights. The British Patent Office, by contrast, established pro-
cedures that made the employment of a specialist intermediary near its
office in London a virtual necessity, and British patentees therefore tended
to be drawn exclusively from wealthier segments of the population. More-
over, it always behaved as if it was granting a royal privilege, rather than
protecting inventors’ rights, and therefore scrutinized all applicants with
immense care to determine whether they were really worthy of the honour
and protection that a patent provided. As a result, the U.S. Patent Office
not only issued far more patents per capita than the British, but also lessened
the chances of patentees having a distinctive class coloration.
State governments were not inventions of civil society to the same degree
as the federal government, since they inherited assemblies, legal insti-
tutions and a small cadre of officials from their colonial predecessors, but
they might perhaps have used the powers reserved to them in ways that
assisted class formation. However, one must immediately note that sub-
national governments inevitably have less chance of creating classes, what-
ever their intentions may be, since classes are, we have already agreed,
national phenomena. In the event, most state governments were no more
inclined than the federal government to differentiate their white male
inhabitants in ways that might have prompted the formation of classes.
Most of them defined the meaning of the revolution in exactly the same
way as the federal government, that is to say, by means of constitutional
conventions ratified by popular referenda. As a result of these conventions
and the new constitutions they devised, many, though not all, of the pro-
perty restrictions on the suffrage of adult white males were removed, other
than in Connecticut and Rhode Island which continued for some decades
to be governed by the provisions of their colonial charters.9 One effective
way of creating class distinctions, was therefore all but eliminated at an
early date in American history.
Another way in which state governments might have divided or ‘classi-
fied’ the population was by using their powers to grant corporate charters
only to those with sufficient influence, connections and resources to per-
suade state legislators to pass a special act of incorporation through the
state legislature. However, within a few decades, many state governments
began to pass general laws of incorporation so that any adult meeting certain
specified conditions was able to incorporate as a company. In sharp con-
trast to Britain and the rest of Europe, the number of joint-stock companies
increased rapidly.10 By 1830, there were nearly 2,000 in New England alone,
and about the same number in the rest of the country, which was many
times more than Britain and the rest of Europe combined.11
Many of the charters which had been granted by the colonial authorities
came under attack after the revolution, including those granted to a number
of universities. Although the U.S. Supreme Court had denied the right of
state legislatures to recall them, the legislature of New Hampshire sought,
in 1816, to annul that granted to Dartmouth College, accusing the college
of ‘aristocratic tendencies’, and declaring its intention to convert it into a
state-controlled Dartmouth University for the benefit of the entire population
of New Hampshire. The trustees resisted, and in a celebrated confrontation
triumphed before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1824. State governments there-
after had to respect the rights of all chartered private educational insti-
tutions. However, if they could not recall colonial charters, legislators were
able to undermine the privileged status that they thought colleges like
Dartmouth enjoyed, by responding favourably when lobbied by academic
entrepreneurs and the boosters of ambitious towns, and freely granting
charters of incorporation to their proposed degree-awarding institutions.
Some 516 colleges or universities were chartered before the Civil War,
about 182 of which proved to be permanent.12 Old colonial institutions
might still preserve a certain status, but the proliferation of competitive
degree-granting colleges and universities, and the democratization of
American higher education, was on its way. State governments themselves
later became significant participants in it, especially after the Morrill Act of
1864, and its extension in 1890, provided endowments in the form of
federal land-grants for state higher educational institutions. In many newer
states these often became the leading institutions of higher education, but
they were never monopolies. Access to higher education was not therefore
something that states could control or bestow on a select section of their
young people.
A status distinction of a sort did, of course, remain between private fee-
paying institutions for those who could afford them, and public-supported
ones for those who could not, but the willingness of state legislatures to
grant charters for degree-granting institutions rather freely to all those who
applied for them, meant this distinction was also blurred, and provided a
rather uncertain foundation for the formation and reproduction of a class.
American higher educational institutions were soon as varied as the pro-
ducts in any competitive market, and for all purses, and the new insti-
tutions were not legally distinguished or disadvantaged in any way from
older ones like Harvard, Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth that had been granted
charters by the colonial authorities. As a result, Trow observed, ‘it has always
been more difficult to link particular types of American educational insti-
tutions with particular classes than in Europe.’ They have had, in his view,
‘multiple and overlapping functions and the boundaries between traditional
and adult education, college and non-college, full-time and part-time, voca-
tional and general’ are ‘permeable and blurred.’ Europeans, as he put it,
generally ‘prefer to keep the boundaries between different kinds of insti-
tution clearer, their functions purer, and with less overlap.’13 European
higher educational institutions have, in other words, tended to be more
congruent with, and supportive of, class differences than American ones.
To illustrate his argument, he listed the further and higher educational pro-
vision in a single American city, Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 1980s. He
found, in all, 11 institutions, whose respective roles and catchments had
not been planned or co-ordinated by any public body, and in which the
federal government had no role whatever. ‘No doubt’, he observed, ‘with
careful empirical research we could rank these institutions by the socio-
economic background of their students but they cannot be linked in a fam-
iliar, immediately acceptable colloquial, manner with classes and strata.’14
Much the same might be said of elementary and secondary schools. Bailyn
thought that the colonies had begun to diverge from the mother country
in this respect at a very early date when the early settlers ceased to rely
either on family resources or on apprenticeship, and made formal collective
arrangements, often by importing indentured servant teachers from England,
to establish schools to which parents sent their children, and masters their
apprentices. He identified more than a 100 of such schools that were estab-
lished in the American colonies between 1723–1790.15 Schools therefore
assumed particular importance in colonial American life, while apprentice-
ship, the ‘ancient form of subordination and dependency’ as Bailyn called
it, began to change both in form and character. Masters no longer acted in
loco parentis, and young men no longer grew up in an inherited network of
moral obligations. As a result of the shift to an ‘open world of publicly
available schools … trade education … lost something of its mystery.’16

Moreover, these new schools did not depend on the state, on an educated
elite, on wealthy benefactors, or on those responsible for giving the instruc-
tion, but on the communities ‘who had created and maintained’ them.
Hence began, Bailyn argued, ‘one of the lasting, distinctive characteristics
of American education’, which is that ‘it is very sensitive to community
pressure….We live with its consequences still.’17
After the revolution, most state governments committed themselves to
support public education.18 Five of them included the support of common
schools in their first constitutions, ‘common’ meaning schools open
equally to all members of community, which the English later came to call
‘comprehensive’.19 Several more subsequently did so, either by consti-
tutional amendment or by declaring such support a principle of public
policy. Although these were often merely statements of intent, and fol-
lowed by such clauses ‘as soon as circumstances will permit’ which allowed
them to postpone action, the number of states that sought to fulfil their
commitment to provide tax-supported schools available to every child,
in every community, slowly but steadily increased through the early and
mid-nineteenth century.
As they did so, there was a real possibility that a class distinction might
have emerged between the private schools supported by those who could
afford to pay for their children’s tuition, and publicly-supported schools,
reserved for the children of those who could not.20 In Pennsylvania such a
distinction had in fact emerged by the 1820s. Immediately after a common
school law was passed in 1833, some legislators hoped to maintain and
institutionalize this distinction by proposing an amendment to the law
that would have limited access to publicly-supported schools to those chil-
dren whose parents could not afford to pay for their education. Cam-
paigners for the tax-supported common schools clearly understood the
class-forming potential of this amendment. In 1834, Thaddeus Stevens
spoke for them in the state legislature. This proposed amendment would
mean, he said, that ‘the names of those who have the misfortune to be
poor men’s children shall be forever preserved as a distinct class … here-
ditary distinctions of rank are sufficiently odious, but that which is founded
on poverty is even more so. Such a law should be entitled “an act for
branding and marking the poor, so that they may be known from the rich
and the proud.”’21 The amendment was defeated, and no American state
thereafter ‘branded’ and ‘marked’ the poor, or public schools, in this man-
ner. American educational institutions became socially selective and dif-
ferentiated, but indirectly – via the community which they served – and
indistinctly as there was no sharp, clear and institutionalized dividing line
between types of institutions, between exclusive, long-established private
schools to which all the more prosperous parents preferred to send their
children and poorly-funded public ones for the rest.
Overall, therefore, it is difficult to find actions of the American federal

or state governments towards education that might have helped to create or
institutionalize and reproduce class barriers, and the same might be said of
other kinds of public provision. In his comparative study of American and
German white collar workers between 1890–1914, Kocka was in no doubt that
this was one of the main reasons why ‘the collar line was simply not as sig-
nificant a dimension for differentiating….social classes and groups’ in the
United States over this period as it was in Germany. After noting, and empha-
sizing, the absence of a stratified school system, he pointed out that since
the beginnings of Bismarck’s social insurance, the German state had ‘differ-
entiated the rights and benefits of salaried employees and workers groups
along the collar line.’ It thereby ‘reinforced the significance of the distinction
between them’ and, incidentally, gave them both ‘a motive for collective
organization.’ American governments declined to do anything of the kind.22
Public housing provides another example. Since it is designed to help the
most needy, it must necessarily distinguish them from the rest of the com-
munity in a particularly visible and enduring manner, and might easily
therefore create or reinforce a class distinction. Public housing began in the
United States only in 1937, which is much later than in other industrial
societies, and therefore corroborates Kocka’s argument. It also advanced at
a slow pace, because, as Fuerst put it, ‘real estate committees, citizen groups
or local legislative councils have made concerted and usually successful
efforts’ to block it. Every site selected … was required to obtain the approval of
a local legislative body. A number of states and a number of localities have
laws which require a local referendum before any site can be approved.’
Such local referenda were repeatedly challenged in the courts, but their
legality and binding force were approved by the U.S. Supreme Court by an
8 to 1 majority in 1970.23 This is one reason why less than 1% of the
American population currently resides in publicly provided housing.
The motives of the parties, and the merits of the case are not here our
concern. The only point of interest is that it demonstrates the same reluc-
tance, or inability, of the state to take actions which might appear to
favour, or to distinguish one segment of the population from the rest and
might thereby encourage the differentiation of classes. The Office of Eco-
nomic Opportunity (OEO), launched in 1963 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s
‘great society’, provides another example. Among other things, it was
intended to protect the poor, by providing free legal services, from ‘the
capricious ways that some businesses intervened in their lives’ – by repos-
session orders, garnishment of wages and evictions, and the like. Katz’s
study of the agency showed that by doing so, it ‘had helped to create class-
segmented public programs in housing, food, medical care.’24 These class-
forming consequences of OEO’s activities were, however, widely noticed
and criticized, and were probably one of the reasons why the agency only
survived for some two decades.
Diametrically opposing this line of argument, DeMott argued that public

policy in the United States is ‘routinely class-biased’ in that ‘publicly financed
options, advantages, programs theoretically available to all are in fact
restricted by official rulings, and by social distribution of civic and other
competencies to a favoured few.’25 He implies there are many examples,
but examined only two to prove his point. The first was the action of draft
boards during the Vietnam War 1963–1974, which was he thought the
‘worst recent episode of state-administered class injustice’. He showed
that boards did not draft randomly from the age-cohort of the population,
but disproportionately from ethnic minorities, from the less educated and
the poor. He mentioned a Harvard Crimson report that of the 1,200 in the
class of 1970, only two served in Vietnam. His second example was tax
exemptions allowed on mortgage interest payments. No doubt he is right
to point to the class bias in both of these public policies, though mortgage
tax exemptions can hardly be said to be limited to ‘a favoured few’, but
neither of them seem likely to have created a shared class interest or visible
and durable class distinction between those who have benefited from them
and those who have not. Harvard alumni who avoided the draft are unlikely
to have recognized any common interest with those who benefited from mort-
gage tax exemptions, nor all non-Harvard alumni with all non-mortgagees.
It seems unlikely, therefore, that these decisions provoked any recognizable
‘them’ and ‘us’.
The one big exception to the general rule of American public policy
against visibly segmenting sections of the population derives, of course,
from race not class. Slaves were distinguished from citizens in Southern
states by law, and after emancipation, a multiplicity of legal provisions in
access to voting and all manner of public facilities continued to distinguish
Afro-Americans from the rest of the community, and largely informally,
the distinction became a national one. If slavery and discrimination were
the great exceptions to the general rule, the attempt to be rid of their
legacy is not. Affirmative action programmes designed to reverse and com-
pensate for this prior discrimination have themselves encountered oppo-
sition on the grounds that they create a favoured, identifiable class of
citizens, consisting of members of all those ethnic groups who can claim
that their ancestors were discriminated against, and that their descendants
now deserve special preferential consideration in academic selection pro-
cedures or in employment hiring tests. They have, therefore provoked
the same kind of political opposition that blocked public housing and the
Community Legal Services of the OEO.
In California, this opposition obtained sufficient support to permit a
referendum, which appeared as Proposition 209, on the ballot in the Cali-
fornia election of 1996. It proposed, in language lifted from the equal rights
provisions of the constitution, that affirmative action be abandoned. It was
supported by 54% of the voters, and as required by California’s consti-
tution, the result of this referendum was immediately added to the consti-
tution of the state. It became Article 1, Section 31, and went into effect on
August 28th 1997.26 Irrespective of the outcome of the present campaigns
that this has provoked in other states, both for and against, and the merits
of the argument, it seems safe to predict, if past practice is any guide, that
the days of affirmative action across the United States are numbered.27
It will not, of course, have escaped anyone’s attention that the restraints
that civil society placed on the federal and state governments in the early
decades of the republic were all designed to prevent the emergence of pri-
vileged classes, either of a titled aristocracy, or voters, or of company pro-
moters, or of university graduates, whereas the more recent ones, like public
housing, legal services, or affirmative action, were measures to help the
most needy and disadvantaged sections of the population, who attract con-
siderably more sympathy, especially among foreign observers. In the pre-
sent context, however, the only point is to observe the consistent principle
informing public policy, whether in the eighteenth, nineteenth or twen-
tieth centuries which is best expressed in Jefferson’s dictum ‘equal rights
for all, special privileges for none.’
As a result, it seems unlikely that we will find state actions, or state-
supported institutions, favouring specific segments of American civil society
in some way, granting them different rights and privileges from the rest,
and thereby prompting the formation of classes, as we have been able to do
in both Russia and France, and if we do they are likely to be exceptional. It
follows that if national classes have been formed and maintained in the
United States, they must have depended largely, if not entirely, on spon-
taneous and voluntary action by organized interests within civil society.
Our investigation will therefore proceed by focusing on those organized
interests that have hoped and intended to create a class, or those that, inci-
dental to some other goal, may unwittingly have assisted in the formation
of one.
Everything we have been told about the major American political parties
suggests that they have been disinclined to perform such a task. Minor
political parties, such as the workingmen’s parties, the Grange or the agrar-
ian populists have occasionally articulated and addressed class grievances,
and the Socialist Party explicitly sought to represent the working class
nationally, but they were all short-lived, in all probability precisely because
they were explicitly class parties. The permanent, major national parties
have been unwilling to limit their appeal to a particular class, even when
they drew their support disproportionately from one socio-economic
section of the population rather than another. Most of the time, to quote
one typical mid-twentieth century observer, they have ‘preferred to engage
in a contest of the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ for the spoils of office’ and were often
therefore ‘hardly distinguishable from one another with respect to prin-
ciples or objectives.’28 The major political parties are more likely therefore
to have helped to dissolve classes than to have been agents of the forma-
tion of any class. We will have to look elsewhere.
Deprofessionalization disbands the middle class
If we turn to consider the middle class in the light of these considerations,

organized professions seem to the best candidates, since in the early years
of the Republic, lawyers and doctors in several new states continued the
exclusive associations they had formed in the colonial period. These associ-
ations collectively limited access to the practice of their profession, enforced
certain rules amongst their members, and sought to define their own exclu-
sive work jurisdictions, and distinguish their members from unadmitted
practitioners. If other newly-emerging professions had imitated them, they
might, collectively, have constituted the organized core of a middle class.
This, however, never happened. The corporate institutions of both barris-
ters (as they were still called) and physicians were attacked and destroyed,
precisely because they were seen as a potential class in the making, though
they were usually portrayed by their critics as a potential ‘aristocracy’ or
‘ruling class’, rather than a middle class. Under continuous electoral pres-
sure, state governments progressively repealed their licensing privileges,
and allowed a free market in the practice of law and medicine to develop.29
Deprived of any form of regulatory corporate body, lawyers and doctors
became as competitive and entrepreneurial as tradesmen, and both they
and their clients were more likely to be randomly distributed across all sec-
tions of the population. Bar associations continuing from the colonial
period collapsed, with the sole exception of the Philadelphia Law Asso-
ciation. Despite Americans’ supposed special capacity to create voluntary
associations, none were successfully established between 1835 and 1875
when the Association of the Bar of the City of New York was formed. The
medical profession experienced a similar, though less catastrophic, hiatus
of professional association.30
Another possible corporate base of middle class pride and ethics was the
civil service, for aside from the elite, which may form part of an upper or
ruling class, the vast majority of civil servants might have constituted, as
they have elsewhere, a solid foundation of middle class rectitude, sobriety
and organization. But career civil servants were also prevented from per-
forming such a role in the United States. Under pressure from popular elec-
torates, state governments had introduced a ‘rotation’ or ‘spoils’ system
into their administrations almost immediately following the revolution,
so that their civil servants were removed at the end of the terms of the
elected officials who appointed them. Following his election victory in
1828, Andrew Jackson imported the system into the federal government,
and the subsequent periodic influx of spoilsmen to the federal capital, pre-
vented the federal civil service acting as the anchor of a ruling class, a
middle class, or any kind of class.31 It was too unstable, and its members too
individualistic, too competitive, and too venal, to perform any such role.
Over the second quarter of the nineteenth century, while the organized
bar, organized medicine, and career civil services were being reformed, the
judiciary was subject to electoral attack for the same reasons, and over sub-
sequent decades was made elective for fixed terms.32 A stable, secure, tenured
judiciary could not therefore compensate, as it were, for the disappearance
of an organized bar. The absence of an established national church meant
that clergymen did not maintain certain standards of income, of life style,
or of conduct that would have enabled them to contribute to the definition
and demarcation of a class. Connecticut was an exception and maintained
an established church through the early decades of the republic, but else-
where churches competed in a great national marketplace of belief.33 For
reasons already mentioned, there were also no ‘established’ universities, but
only a highly differentiated marketplace of academic knowledge offering
degrees and institutions for varied income levels and aspirations. All the
professions therefore – lawyers, doctors, civil servants, judges, clergymen
and professors – were internally differentiated and competing in their
respective marketplaces, and quite unable to provide stable, corporately-
organized foundations of a recognized middle class.
Historians have been unwilling to give the early opponents of the pro-
fessions much credit for strangling an emergent class at birth, principally,
I suspect, because the professions have never been thought to be significant
agents of class formation in the first place. However, in the light of the
evidence of the exclusive admission requirements, and phenomenally high
rates of self-recruitment of the unreformed, post-revolutionary bar of Suf-
folk County, Massachusetts, and of the subsequent actions of the exclusive
Philadelphia Law Association, not to mention the role professionals have
played in class formation in England which we consider later, the claims of
the early enemies of the professions deserve to be reconsidered.34
Let us imagine for a moment, counter-factually, that something like
the Suffolk County Association or the Philadelphia Law Association had
survived and flourished along with similar associations in New York City,
Baltimore, Williamsburg, Charleston, Atlanta, New Orleans and in Wash-
ington D.C., and that they had formed an American Bar Association in
1828 instead of 1878, and that bar associations in the newer cities in the
middle and far West had been formed, and affiliated to it through the mid-
nineteenth century. Alongside them, let us also imagine medical societies
that had resisted the attacks of the Thomsonians, Botanics and other ‘irreg-
ulars’, gone on to organize their profession nationally, and controlled who
was admitted to it, and the training of all their recruits. And to complete
the counter-factual picture, let us also imagine career civil servants, in both
the federal and state governments, or the clergy of an established church
or the professoriate of a network of universities linked to the University of
the United States in Washington D.C. Over time, as each of these pro-
fessions established their own self-governing institutions, and developed
their own codes of ethics and etiquette, their own distinctive customs and
manners, it is reasonable to predict that the members of each of them
would have come to acknowledge their equals in terms of honour among
the others, would have tended to self-recruit and intermarry among them-
selves, and in so doing they would have defined a confident and secure
middle class.
Imagining this counter-factual experience does not, as it happens, require
a great leap of the imagination. One has only to glance across the Atlantic
at contemporaneous England to see the entire process, or nightmare as it
might seem to American observers, graciously acted out. And what is it that
one has to imagine away from the United States to sustain this counter-
factual reverie? Nothing, surely, to do with the means of production or
with inequalities of wealth. What one has to imagine away, above all
else, are the political forces that destroyed the organized professions, that
replaced a lifetime civil service selected by merit with one based on elec-
toral spoils, that tolerated the proliferation of university charters, and left a
multiplicity of religious denominations to compete with one another,
while leaving none of them inferior to an established church. The differ-
ences between the two countries, which explain the contrasting oppor-
tunities they offered for the organization of the middle class, were in other
words political rather than economic.
The ‘fanatics’ who harassed the organized legal profession of the early
American Republic, the ‘irregulars’ who brought down the organized medi-
cine, and the supporters of the spoils system, therefore deserve recognition
for their part in dismantling, or rather pre-empting, the formation of a class
system, because they prevented the creation of a network of interlocking,
stable, corporately-organized professions that could have provided it with a
solid, self-conscious middle. Some lawyers, some doctors, some professors,
some architects, no doubt recognized their common interests without any
formal corporate institutions. Informally, an ‘inner bar’ survived in several
cities and on frontier circuits, and no doubt other professions had their
equivalents.35 But without a formally-organized, and state-recognized body
controlling access to the profession, responsible for training recruits,
defending some ideal of professional practice, and reminding all lawyers of
expected standards of professional behaviour, American lawyers became
enormously differentiated in ethics, clientele, and working methods. The
same differentiating forces were at work in other professions, with an elite
acknowledging some common standards while disdaining the much larger
number of their fellow practitioners, who practised like petty traders, and
acknowledged no wider obligations and responsibilities. The Philadelphia
Law Association, the only surviving bar association, is a perfect illustration
of the phenomenon, an enclave of honour, ethics and organization, sur-
rounded by a mass of unorganized lawyers whom they didn’t know, and

didn’t wish to know.36
In the absence of corporately-organized professions, the middle class is
rather difficult to see and define, though Blumin claimed that white collars
made it visible in the two or three decades on either side of the Civil War.
By his account it was, however, only a wraith of a class, since before the
war it was ‘not fully formed’, and soon after it ‘the mostly formed crystals
of class would alter in form and partly dissolve’37 Moreover, its members do
not seem to have been enthusiastic about publicly proclaiming their dis-
tinctiveness. They were not inclined ‘to articulate their position in a class
taxonomy’, indeed they often denied the very existence of classes, and they
never acquired any organized political expression or collective ideology.
The two major political parties had, Blumin pointed out, already created
‘institutional machinery’ to mobilize voters from all classes, and adopted
‘the rhetoric of classless democracy’ though this was not, he argued, alto-
gether fatal, since ‘the social values, styles, and networks that gave the
middle class its greatest coherence were not those that required expression
through politics.’38 Instead, they emerged in the workplace, from differ-
ences in income that were translated ‘into differences in lifestyle, outlook
and aspiration’, and were evident in their residential and consumption pat-
terns, in their participation in voluntary associations and in their family
life.… so that a middle class was formed’, and came to represent, ‘a specific
set of experiences, a specific style of living, and a specific social identity – a
social world, in sum, that was distinct from others above and below it …’39
This fleeting middle class was, one may notice, entirely the work of civil
society, building on differences of income and working conditions. Blumin
does not refer at any point to any political decision, any law, any state
action or public provision that might have assisted its formation, other
than to note that children of non-manual parents were more inclined to
stay at public schools rather longer than those of manual workers.40 Manu-
facturing and retail employers contributed to it, by differentiating the work-
space and employment conditions of their white and blue collar employees.
Activists in voluntary associations also contributed, for though they were
not exclusive, most appealed, Blumin claimed, disproportionately to one
class or other, as did entertainment and sports entrepreneurs. Finally, and
perhaps most importantly in his view, housewives made a contribution by
buying food and furnishings which created a distinctive middle class home
environment. Organized professions are never mentioned, and trade unions
only in passing. Indeed this class had no distinctive and exclusive collec-
tive institutions at all, and no collective voice, which is presumably why it
didn’t last long and why the ‘categorical’ distinctions between classes that
Blumin sought always eluded his grasp.
Over the closing decades of the century, the boundaries of this class
became ‘less clear’ as the upper class above it ‘lost visibility and force’, and
was displaced from public view by national celebrities, and as the rapidly
growing armies of routine non-manual workers were no longer assured
of higher incomes or better promotion prospects than manual workers.
Outside the workplace at least, manual workers, and their wives, increas-
ingly ‘saw themselves as middle class’, and the gap between the proportion
of their children entering and completing high school and those of non-
manual parents narrowed. The blue and white collar distinction therefore
‘no longer symbolized consistent differences in life style … that had shaped
class in the nineteenth century.’41
As it happened though, just as white collars were losing their class-
forming potential, the professions were reorganizing, and seeking to reverse
the radical deprofessionalization of the early decades of the century. Bar
and medical associations were established in the late 1870s, and rapidly
increased in number towards the end of the century. The Civil Service
Reform League was formed in 1877 to reverse the spoils system. Largely due
to its efforts the Pendleton Act, which permitted the restoration of merit
appointments in the federal civil service, and thereby inaugurated the
revival of a career civil service, was passed in 1883.42 Authoritative reports
on the educational preparation for three of the most important professions
appeared in the twentieth century: Flexner on medical education in 1900,
Reed on legal education in 1910, and the Society for the Promotion of
Engineering Education’s (SPEE) Report on Engineering Schools in 1934.43
These reports were concerned with the widely varying, and sometimes
abysmal, standards of admission and education of their respective profes-
sions, which had emerged as a result of the rapid, free-market growth of
colleges and universities, and only secondarily with the conduct of prac-
titioners. Their recommendations were intended to improve educational
standards by raising requirements for admission to the professional schools,
and by extending the length, and raising the quality of the schools’
courses. If the proposals in all three reports had, by some magic, been
immediately realized, then it is possible that these three professions, along-
side a simultaneous and instantaneous reform of the civil service, might
have formed the spine of an organized middle class, which other organized
occupations might have sought to emulate and join. These reports, how-
ever, were private elite initiatives. They were not sponsored or published by
the federal government or by state governments intent on restructuring the
professions. Nor were they responses to a groundswell of opinion among
practitioners hoping to revive their corporate ethics and esprit.
Flexner’s report had the most immediate impact. Through the second
decade of the twentieth century, by means of newly-established accredita-
tion procedures, many of the cheaper medical schools catering to ethnic
minorities and poorer students were, at the urging of the American Medical
Association, and with the help of state legislatures, closed.44 Access to the
profession was therefore restricted, and it must have become more cohesive
as a result, though even so the AMA appears to have been able to recruit a
substantial majority of physicians only briefly during the inter-war years.45
In the other two professions, it is impossible to detect any such impact.
Early attempts to restrict access to the legal profession via reform of the law
schools, provoked political opposition very similar to that which had
destroyed the organized profession in the early decades of the Republic.
Accreditation of law schools therefore proceeded at a much slower pace,
which ensured that the legal profession could not become too exclusive. In
any case, voluntary bar associations only managed to recruit a substantial
proportion of practising lawyers in the original 13 states, and it was there-
fore only in those states that lawyers could give some semblance of belong-
ing to a corporate body that was responsibly endeavouring to uphold its
own code of ethics. Elsewhere, the failure of voluntary self-regulating bar
associations meant that lawyers were organized compulsorily, and often
unwillingly, by law into so-called ‘integrated’ bar associations. These are,
one may notice, one instance of state recognition of a segment of the popu-
lation and might therefore, alongside the licensing of other professions,
have contributed to the formation of a class. In the event, they were widely
resented, and frequently had considerable difficulties imposing their authority
on practitioners and reminding of them of their professional obligations, so
it seems unlikely that they did much to instil any wider class sentiments.46
The SPEE’s efforts are thought to have encouraged some engineering
schools to raise their admission and teaching standards, but they had virtu-
ally no effect on their number, and there was no consensus within the pro-
fession to use accreditation as a means for licensing or closure, as doctors
had done, and as some bar associations were attempting to do, probably
because too many engineers had already entered management and would
themselves have found it difficult to obtain a license. Besides, virtually all the
engineering associations were financially dependent on corporate support.47
The elite of civil engineers, a large proportion of whom were self-employed
or worked in partnerships, was an exception. They had always favoured
licensing legislation, and although such legislation began to be passed by
state legislatures in the 1930s, and by 1947 they had all done so, this did
not close the engineering profession or make it much more exclusive, since
the licensing requirements only applied to engineers engaged on certain
kinds of public projects.48
None of these three reports had any direct effect on the organization or
the practice of the three professions. They are landmarks, therefore, in the
history of professional education, but not in the history of professional
government or professional practice. As for the Pendleton Act, it permitted,
rather than required, presidents to reclassify positions into the merit or
career service, and altogether excluded the higher policy-making jobs, which
remained political or spoils appointments. It took a very long time to com-
plete reclassification. Franklin Roosevelt stalled it considerably.49 Richard
Nixon was the remarkable exception. Where previous presidents had only
classified positions on leaving office, after they had made use of it for polit-
ical purposes, he completed the reclassification process on entering office in
January 1969, leaving a so-called ‘excepted service’ of political appointees,
who currently constitute less than 1% of total federal employment. The
classified service has, however, shown little inclination to organize by pro-
fesssional or occupational specialty, or by their rank or their ‘class’ like the
British counterparts. Neither occupation nor class spontaneously emerged
as a natural basis of collective organization and action among American
civil servants.50 Unions with substantial numbers of federal employees com-
monly include professionals, senior managers, white collar and blue collar
employees, and can hardly therefore coincide with any tentative class align-
ments in the wider society.
Over a very long period therefore, American professionals were either
without any corporate association, or organized only as minorities, and
therefore enjoyed a large measure of freedom to conduct their practices as
they wished, and to compete for customers like tradesmen or businessmen
from whom they were often difficult to distinguish, being no less market-
oriented, and no less inclined to measure their success purely in market
terms.51 Organized professions have, therefore, been able to make only a
limited contribution to the definition of a middle class by way of their cor-
porate institutions or distinctive working practices, or their ethics or manners.
As a result, the American middle class has remained rather difficult to define
and identify, and seems to be little more than a vast, rather vague and
amorphous income bracket to which almost every working person could
claim to belong. When confronted by an interviewer, most Americans
seem happy do just that, and amiably identify themselves with almost
everyone else, including the interviewer. Part of the difficulty in defining
and delimiting the middle class, however, is that those who might have
organized above and below them also failed to distinguish themselves by
creating enduring and distinctive corporate institutions.
Are American workers exceptional, or just different?
When we come to consider the formation of the American working class,

we face a peculiar problem. The United States was one of the earliest indus-
trial societies, but unlike the industrial pioneer, England, soon organized its
manufacturing enterprises in exactly the manner Marx had predicted, that
is, by de-skilling and homogenizing its manual labour force, which it
did more rapidly, more thoroughly and comprehensively than any other
capitalist country.52 American employers were the first to separate the design
and planning of work from its execution. If they were not the first to
employ graduates as managers, they were certainly the first to employ them
in large numbers, and they were simultaneously indifferent or hostile to
the apprenticeships of skilled workers. Nor did they encourage or support

any alternative publicly-provided of technical schools for their manual
workers. Hence, they created much the most sharply divided labour force
in the industrial world, with the highest proportion of formally-educated
managers controlling the least formally-educated manual workers.53 Shadwell
was among the first to notice its peculiar educational profile. In 1906 he
observed that American education ‘supplies industries from above rather
than below’, and he then went on to document the scarcity of lower trade
and technical schools.54 There are no reliable, cross-national historical
series of the educational profiles of the labour forces of industrial societies
to track this over the twentieth century but the very fact that the United
States was both the first to develop business education on a wide scale, and
as we shall see below, always had a low proportion of skilled workers, tends
to support the view that the American labour force had quite distinctive
‘relations of production’.55
Hence, if Marx had correctly identified the processes by which a working
class is formed, then the United States should have been the first to form
one. The first homogeneous, unskilled industrial proletariat should have
been American, not English. Many of his followers therefore had high
hopes for the revolutionary potential of the American proletariat. Engels
was among the first to be excited by the prospect. It ‘took the working class
in England years and years before they fully realized that they formed a
distinct … permanent class’, he observed, ‘and years again until this class
consciousness led them to form themselves into a distinct political party’,
but ‘on the more favoured soil of America … where history begins with
the elements of modern bourgeois society … the American working class
has advanced as far, in ten months.’56 Lipset identified various other
Marxist theorists who, until the Russian Revolution confounded their pre-
dictions, ‘anticipated that, following the logic of historical materialism, the
United States would be the first country in which socialists would come to
power.’57
As we all know, it didn’t turn out like that. The ‘relations of production’
may have been just right, and there may have been more than adequate
inequalities of wealth and income, but most observers, especially foreign
observers, have had to spend their time trying to explain the comparatively
feeble and limited expression of working class consciousness in the United
States, and its failure to generate much support for a socialist party or
labour movement. The United States may have had high rates of social
conflict, civil disorder and labour unrest, but virtually none of it could be
called class action, in the sense that it mobilized members as a class or had
a specific class objective.58 A large and stimulating literature, to which
Marx, Sombart, Lenin, Wells, Hartz and many others have contributed, has
sought to explain American ‘exceptionalism’. Lipset’s comprehensive review
of it found ‘so many explanations’ that he thought ‘the outcome seems
overdetermined.’ He classified them into eight ‘societal factors’ not count-

ing various sub-variants, and four main ‘political’ factors.59
In a sense, the present analysis can be said to be at odds with them all,
since it is trying to show that class formation in the United States can be
analysed and understood by reference to exactly the same political vari-
ables as the class formation in the other three societies, and that these same
variables will also explain the fate of all potential class formations in the
United States, not simply that of the working class which was the concern
of the ‘exceptionalists’. Moreover, it also hopes to show that these other
societies vary among themselves as much as they differ from the United
States, and are all therefore, in certain specified respects, exceptional. It is,
however, unnecessary to argue with any of the contributors to this excep-
tionalist literature since some of the factors which they adduce to explain
why American workers have proved unenthusiastic about socialism refer,
indirectly or under some other heading, to the relationship between the
state and civil society, and it would not advance the argument to note
these points of agreement. Two points, however deserve notice because of
the empirical support they received from Laslett’s remarkable comparative
study of class formation among miners in Illinois and Lanarkshire, Scotland,
over the period 1830 to 1924.
The first, the extension of the suffrage to white adult American males
before those in other countries, has frequently been mentioned in the
‘exceptionalist’ literature, but Laslett’s research delineated its significance.
He concluded that the process of class formation among miners in the two
countries was ‘similar at the workplace’, with ‘some differences at the com-
munity level,’ while it ‘diverged most sharply’ in the area of electoral pol-
itics. American miners were, he explained, already socialized into the
pre-existing two-party system, and this ‘prevented U.S. colliers from adopt-
ing a collectivist response to the industrialization process’ by supporting
the formation of a separate Labor Party like their counterparts in Scotland.
While ‘primary elections enabled radical candidates to enter’, they also ensured
that a moderate who represented the widest range of Democratic or Republican
opinion would be selected as the candidate.’60
His evidence also lent some support to a second idea, to which we have
already referred but which received much less attention in the exception-
alist literature, that the earlier and wider access to education, especially
higher education, weakened working class solidarity. The Illinois miners
were among those who applied electoral pressure to encourage state gov-
ernments to live up to their commitments and expand publicly-funded
common schools.61 He also noticed ‘severe limits on what even the most
ambitious among the Lanarkshire miners could hope to achieve’, while
‘a significant minority of the most talented leaders among the Illinois
miners, taking advantage of a superior education system, became engineers,
professional men or even mine owners.’62
The American labour movement, and along with it the American work-
ing class, therefore faced a formidable rival, for there appears to be an
in-built incompatibility between the two mass ‘movements’ of labour
organization and of education: the former offered collective betterment
and was therefore class-forming, while the latter promised individual bet-
terment and was therefore class-dissolving. Eugene Debs, socialist candidate
for the American presidency in 1920, urged his supporters to ‘Rise with
your class not out of it’, and though mass higher education was already
beginning to encourage Americans to ‘rise out of your class, not with it’,
most American workers probably did not feel that way until after World
War II.63 In 1947 only 13.4% of white males and 7.3% of black males had
attended college for at least two years.64 Currently, however, nearly one-
third (32.8%) of those over the age of 25 in the American labour force have
graduated from college, and getting on for two-thirds (60.4%) have had
some college experience. By contrast, only 12.2% are union members.65
Over the second half of the twentieth century, we may reasonably infer,
many American workers must have come to the view that they would
rather rise out of their class than with it, and similarly persuaded their chil-
dren. No other labour movement seems to have faced the same challenge,
at least not to the same degree. In France, Russia, and a fortiori England,
mass labour organization preceded mass higher education by a consider-
able period of time. In all probability a satisfactory account of labour and
class organization in the United States would, therefore, be told alongside
an account of the extension of access to colleges and universities, and of
the chances of individual betterment they offered.
Neither of these differentiating factors – cross-class political parties and
mass higher education – require however that we put the United States in a
separate ‘exceptional’ category, and conduct some different kind of analysis
that does not focus on the relationship between the state and civil society if
we hope to understand the process of class formation in the United States, for
both of these differentiating factors were merely consequences of the American
variant of that relationship. The question remains, nevertheless, whether any
of the other factors mentioned in the exceptionalist literature were of such
importance to the formation, or malformation, of the American working class
that it would be unnecessary to refer to the relationship between the state and
civil society? Three ‘exceptional’ factors stand out in this context: first, the
moving frontier, which was thought to have discouraged class consciousness
because it promoted, even required, individual self-reliance rather than collec-
tive action; second, slavery and its successors; and third, the ethnic pluralism
created by mass immigration, both of which are thought to have fragmented
the working class and undermined its solidarity.66
In Turner’s original formulation, the frontier thesis offered a materialist
explanation of American behaviour, a sylvan one of course, but nonetheless
materialist, since the land, the forests and the plains were made the prime
explanatory variable for American institutions and behaviour. In hindsight,

one can only wonder why social scientists ever gave it so much attention.
Sixty years before Turner, Tocqueville had considered this explanation, for
it had been popular even then, and sought to test it by making compar-
isons with neighbouring frontier societies in Canada and Latin America,
where settlers had faced similar boundless territories and forests, and there-
fore provided an opportunity to assess the effects of material circumstances
on their political institutions and habits.67
Tocqueville noted profound differences in the way in which various open
frontiers had been owned, settled and governed, and therefore decided that
prior political decisions and cultural preferences must have been more impor-
tant than material conditions. Turner ignored his argument, proclaimed
the theory, and made no attempt to test it with comparative evidence. If it
were to be used today to explain aspects of America’s class structure, or its
classlessness, then we are entitled to expect that it first pass the compara-
tive test by showing that those who have settled frontiers elsewhere have
responded to them in a basically similar manner to that of Americans. If
they have not, then it is difficult to see how the frontier as such can be
considered a significant explanatory variable. Tocqueville’s conclusion that
the mode of settlement on the American frontier was itself politically-
defined, and those who settled it brought with them institutions, values
and expectations from the East, has been supported by abundant evidence.68
We may therefore conclude that the American frontier was itself an expres-
sion of the pre-existing relationship between the state and civil society,
rather than an independent determinant of a new one. It cannot therefore
provide a plausible alternative explanation of the way classes have formed,
or failed to form, in the United States.
The institutionalization, in a section of the new republic over its first
three-quarters of a century, of the horrific distinction between people,
based on ownership of one person by another, presents a much more serious
problem for the comparative analysis of class formation. After slavery was
abolished, it was succeeded by its grim descendant: Jim Crow. As Afro-
Americans migrated to Northern cities in the 1920s and 1930s, they were
informally diffused across the nation, which created an exceptional national
form of racial discrimination against the former slaves. The closest resem-
blance to this in our other cases is serfdom in Russia, which has sometimes
been described as a form of slavery. But Russian serfdom did not coincide
with skin colour, and though various forms of institutionalized segregation
remained after the formal abolition of the institution in 1862, and even as
we have seen were re-formalized after 1928, the mass mobility of peasants
into urban occupations and into other classes makes the comparison a rather
remote one. Slavery and Jim Crow are therefore exceptional, and might rea-
sonably therefore be held responsible for the peculiarities in the formation
of the American working class.
Acknowledging that point does not, however, enable us or compel us to dis-

pense with references to the relationship between the state and civil society in
favour of some other analytical approach. On the contrary, while slavery was
a means and distinctive form of relations of production, and therefore an eco-
nomic institution, it might equally well serve to illustrate the pre-eminent
power of politics in institutionalizing, and destroying, forms of stratification,
since it was the initial, fateful compromise during the making of the federal
constitution, which eliminated the substantial slave populations of Pennsyl-
vania and New York, while legitimizing those of states in the South. Cap-
italism thereafter flourished in both. The political union might not have been
able to survive half slave, half free, but capitalism evidently could do so, with-
out any difficulty. The existence of slavery does not, therefore, demonstrate
the pre-eminence of material factors in the analysis of stratification in the
United States, or suggest that the relationship between the state and civil
society is of secondary importance.
What it first demonstrates are the limitations of formal, constitutional
declarations of equality, and of state action without the corresponding
affirmation and support from civil society. What it also demonstrates is the
capacity of civil society to maintain and institutionalize segregation and
discrimination not only when state governments supported its efforts, as
they did in the South, but even when they remained indifferent, as they
did for the most part in the North and West. Civil society itself, therefore,
with state support in only one section of the country, was able to create
this pervasive, national form of stratification that marked and disadvan-
taged Afro-Americans everywhere.69 And the eradication of it only began in
earnest when civil society was aroused and organized nationally by the civil
rights movement in the 1960s, that is to say by political action, which
prompted legislation and the creation of federal and state agencies to try
and root out this most durable form of stratification. In short, slavery, and
the strange career of Jim Crow, are themselves only to be understood and
explained by reference to the relationship between the state and civil
society. They do not require or invite an alternative kind of explanation.
The question remains, however, whether, and to what extent, the long
experience of segregation and discrimination, and the campaign against it,
may have undermined working class solidarity.
This is an extremely difficult matter to determine, probably impossible.
There is no doubt that Afro-Americans long had good reason to be sus-
picious and hostile to the craft unions of the American Federation of Labour
(AFL).70 While its national leaders claimed that they recruited without
regard to race or religion, AFL locals frequently barred Afro-Americans for-
mally, or used various subterfuges to exclude them informally. Hence there
was considerable friction between spokesmen of the black community and
the AFL, and in the 1930s black workers were quite willing to be used as strike-
breakers.71 It was only competition from the industrial unions of the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) which led the AFL to relax its
racial restrictions. The CIO was always more favourably disposed towards
Afro-American organizations, churches, newspapers, and to the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and gave
them financial support. The only union in the South not to have institu-
tionalized segregation was the United Mineworkers (UMW), a founding
member of the CIO. In recent times, survey evidence shows that Afro-
Americans have more positive feelings about organized labour than whites,
and identify with the working class more readily than whites, but past
damage is impossible to assess.72 How is one to measure the effect of the
early generations of discrimination and friction on the growth of the union
movement, and on its role in organizing the working class as a whole?73
Similar difficulties arise if one hopes to measure the impact of ethnic
pluralism. The only research design to resolve the matter would require
comparisons of class solidarity in similar communities or regions with and
without considerable numbers of immigrants, or before and after their arrival,
or perhaps before and after unions were obliged to use languages other than
English, and then the construction of some kind of measure of the overall
impact on union or class solidarity. For many reasons, this is an impossible
set of requirements. We therefore have to make do with evidence from par-
ticular communities, with particular types of immigrants, in particular
industries, at particular times. It points both ways.
Gutman was convinced that ethnic immigration had no adverse con-
sequences on union and class solidarity. He pointed out that ‘immigrant
workers in the mid-1880s joined trade unions in numbers far out of propor-
tion to their place in the labour force’, and supported his argument with
two unusual studies, one from Illinois in 1886, which found that only 31%
of native-born workers were members of unions versus 69% of the foreign-
born, and the other from New Jersey in 1887, which found that 48% of
native-born and 52% of foreign-born were members of unions.74 Schneirov
and Suhrbur’s study of one of the major craft unions in multi-ethnic Chicago,
that of the carpenters, over more than a century 1863–1987, provides little
evidence that rivalry or conflict between the astonishing array of ethnic
groups amongst its members inhibited union or class solidarity in any
respect.75 Greene specifically rejected the proposition that Slavic immi-
grants were ‘poor union material’ in the coalmining industry of Pennsyl-
vania, though employers in the industry often acted on the assumption
that they were, and that ethnic diversity would undermine union solidar-
ity.76 Laslett collected telling cross-national evidence, which showed that
the political and cultural divisions that emerged between Protestant miners
and their Irish Catholic counterparts in Lanarkshire, Scotland, over the years
1830 and 1924 were more, rather than less, damaging to the development
of long-term class loyalties than were the ethnic conflicts that developed
between the British, Italians and Slavs in Illinois.77
On some occasions, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that observers do

not want to believe that their heroes, the working class, could have been
tainted by ethnic prejudice, and therefore hoped that class unity would over-
ride ethnic divisions. Kornblum, for example, recounted the successive strug-
gles of various ethnic groups in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
as they competed to establish ‘a residential and institutional base’ and for
respectability, security and power in communal institutions.78 One of his
informants, a Mexican unionist, described the importance of an electoral
campaign ‘When you win it means you get respect and a little power. You
have to get your own people calling the shots for a change. We would be able
to put some people in jobs, positions in the city, and in Springfield. We need
a win real bad … When you win your people can hold their heads up, they
can feel confident when they go into new places.’ Kornblum himself observed
that ‘status cleavages have often prevented the consolidation of class unity in
the community’. However, he then pointed out that ‘local unions and parties
may draw members from the highly diverse cultural segments of the local
society’, and referred to the ‘negotiations of new alliances and constituencies
in which ethnic identities are played down and blended into a more unifying
working class culture’.79 Most of his evidence, however, referred to the ‘status
cleavages’ and to the ethnic rivalries that prevented the consolidation of class
unity, while the blending into ‘a more unified working class culture’ seems
more of an expression of Kornblum’s own hopes for the future than a conclu-
sion from his evidence. Halle was similarly optimistic. The comments and
behaviour of the oil refinery workers from many ethnic groups in New Jersey
in the early 1980s, suggested to him that ethnic ‘cosmologies’ were ‘mediocre’,
and their ‘ethnic identities and symbolism superficial.’ He argued that ‘ethnic
distinctions based on immigrant cultures fade, but the class structure of
America persists. Indeed, the former were, in his view, melting into the latter.
The ‘fading of ethnicity reveals … a society in which the major distinctions
are those of race and class, not ethnicity.’80
Others have plausibly suggested that the impact of immigration depended
on the time period under consideration. Blumin for instance, suggested
that since first-generation immigrants before the Civil War were over-
whelmingly manual workers, immigration then ‘reinforced the collar dis-
tinction’. But when the second generation of immigrants moved into white
collar employment in the late nineteenth century, they ‘increased the likeli-
hood that class and ethnicity would become separate rather than reinforc-
ing identities … For the first time middle class identity and ethnic identity
pulled in different directions’81 Freeman’s account of New York City sug-
gested that the degree of class solidarity varied between ethnic groups, since
some found it easy to form class alliances, while others did not. In the two
decades following World War II, he found that ethnic divisions did not pre-
clude or disturb class solidarity. While acknowledging their ‘complex rela-
tionships to one another’, he thought they had ‘no problem in working
together’, and gave the example of the Italian-Jewish alliance in the

International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). However, after the
post-1965 wave of Hispanic immigration, ‘the strength of ethnic identity
and organization … tended to leave class identity – and the very notion of
working class New York – in the shadows.’82
Numerous studies have, however, shown the adverse impact of ethnic loy-
alties elsewhere, long before 1965. Cantor observed that ‘no one can safely
disregard the recurrent warfare among working peoples of different national
origins, rather than between them and their employers.’ Examples abound –
which he then demonstrated from half-a-dozen states from the 1830s to
1870s.83 Holt thought that Slavic and Hungarian immigration into the work-
force of the steel mills was ‘profoundly divisive’. There is ‘ample evidence that
“Hunkies” and “Polaks” were despised and discriminated against by older-
established groups and ethno-cultural divisions and tensions were pervasive
features of milltown life from the 1890s onwards.’84 Mink was especially
emphatic. She pointed to the ‘extraordinary heterogeneity’ of immigration to
the United States, which unlike that of other ‘receiver’ societies, included
many who were ‘outside the dominant culture’. She had no doubt that ‘immi-
gration created and hardened divisions within the working class, separating
settled and organizing workers from an imported proletarian underclass’, and
that ‘class solidarities gave way before race and status solidarities’ with pro-
found political consequences. Given ‘the immediacy of the problem’, orga-
nized labor ‘came to rely on political resources that already existed: the ruling
political parties, rather than trying to devise an alternative’. Immigration
therefore ‘made a political laggard of American trade unionism’ and ‘neutral-
ized the politics of class’.85
There is therefore evidence for every view: ethnic differences have increased
class solidarity, have undermined it, or had no significant impact. The net
effect both of slavery and discrimination, or ethnic pluralism on union or class
solidarity is, one is forced to conclude, unknown and immeasurable. But
because the impact of one determinant or set of determinants is unknown
hardly seems grounds for abandoning the attempt to identify the impact of
others. Even those, like Mink who argue that ethnic differences had a decisive
impact, do not suggest that they provide a complete explanation of the distinc-
tive features of trade unions or of the working class in the United States. We
will therefore not abandon the attempt to discover how both may have been
affected by the relationship between the state and civil society, and try to cope
with the unknown but always possible impact of racial or ethnic divisions by
flagging them, whether or not the researchers on whom we rely have done so.
Surges of working class solidarity
A key question about the formation of the working class everywhere, as our
accounts of both Russian and French workers have already indicated, is
when and how skilled workers, whose ‘narrow’, ‘selfish’ and ‘aristocratic’
associations were invariably the pioneers of working class organization,
began to co-operate with one another; became less inclined to separate
themselves from the mass of ordinary workers; accepted that they had
common class interests with them; and committed their own considerable
organizational skills and resources to the task of organizing and mobilizing
all workers as a class.
Three attempts to make this transition, to forge cross-trade alliances
and unify the working class, stand out in American labour history, before
the transition was finally completed with the formation of the CIO in
the 1930s, after which American workers were finally organized as a
mass movement, and on industrial rather than trade lines. However, if, we
hope to identify and understand the peculiarities of the working class in
the United States, we have to recall briefly these earlier efforts of class
formation.
The first consisted of the formation of the Workingmen’s Parties in the
late 1820s and the so-called General Trades’ Unions (GTU) in New York,
Boston and Philadelphia in the early 1830s, which sought to mobilize all
workingmen ‘against the aristocracies of power, wealth and privilege which
had seized power in the republic’.86 We will concentrate on that in New
York City which has been described in great and loving detail by Wilentz.87
Although the Workingmen’s Party in the city had enjoyed some electoral
success in 1829, it then disintegrated in disarray and recrimination, leaving
little permanent mark on New York politics, except a preference within
organized labour to support political candidates rather than try to form a
party of their own.88 Hence the main agents of class formation in the city
were societies of journeymen, who had, like their counterparts in France,
started to recognize themselves as members of a distinctive class of wage
earners some years before, when the original small-scale craft workshops
began to be superseded by larger, specialized, workplaces created by a few
of the more entrepreneurial masters who had turned themselves into
employers of other members of their own trade.89 Most journeymen there-
after had little prospect of advancing to master, and were destined to
remain lifelong wage labourers in workplaces with ‘lines of authority
deeply at variance with American egalitarian values’, as well as with the
original egalitarian and collegial ideals of the crafts. It was the trades most
affected by these changes, the ‘bastardized’ crafts, as Wilentz calls them,
which were ‘at the heart of New York’s emerging working class.’
Nine of their unions came together to form the General Trades’ Union
(GTU) in 1833, which over the next four years led ‘a series of offensives’
which saw ‘New York wage earners organize over fifty unions and nearly
forty strikes’. Most of the new unions were members of the GTU, which
‘helped to co-ordinate strikes of them all.’ Wilentz estimated, that some-
where between 20% and 30% of the white male workforce in the city were
organized. Most of them were propertyless. They were also ethnically

diverse, and their leaders ‘did their utmost to discourage ethnic disputes,
especially where new forms of wage labour were most pronounced.’ They
had few ties with organized religion – he seems pleased to report – and,
included in their ranks some of the most outspoken free thinkers in the
city as well as deists and rationalists, anti-sabbatarians and critics of clerical
tax exemptions.90 Their internal procedures were, Wilentz noted, scrupu-
lously democratic and egalitarian, ‘more so than middle class reform and
political parties’, and they were ‘relatively free of jurisdictional disputes.’91
Their strikes were aimed above all else to regain control of the workshop
regime, to halt the subdivision of work, and to prevent exploitation
by contracting and sweating, and the ‘unprincipled, uncontrolled com-
petition’ that was overtaking their trades. They were not, however, ‘selfish
and money-oriented’ and ‘always looking to preserve their privileges and
high wages.’92 They sometimes acted ‘for the sake of their brother workmen’,
sought to build ‘a new brotherhood of craft workers’, and ‘proclaimed a
unity of all organized journeymen as wage earners regardless of craft.’ They
sometimes ‘reached out to semi-skilled workers’ and even ‘for a moment
considered allying with common laborers in a general strike.’93 They were
seldom violent, preferring ‘dignified opposition’ and ‘manly conduct’. They
launched various benevolent projects, such as a newspaper reading-room
and library; frequented their own clubs and taverns; and in union celebra-
tions ‘paraded through the city behind their own banners, and singing
their own songs.’94
Wilentz intended, he said, ‘to do for American working people and their
past something of what Thompson had done for the English.’ Thompson
had, he thought, ‘not simply given back to the English working class its
dignity and its culture; he had given back its gift of intellection.’95 Like
Thompson, he also declined to put himself into a conceptual straitjacket
and treat class as if it were a ‘structure’ or ‘an abstract social category or
group.’ He therefore did not claim it was ‘a single entity, bound by a unity
of sentiment across the shifting barriers of trade, region, race, sex, or eth-
nicity, autonomous and eternally resentful of all other classes’ Instead, he
saw it as ‘a new order of human relationships … defined chiefly … by the
subordination of wage labour to capital’, within which ‘several tendencies
and outlooks’ co-existed, and ‘various and changing forms’ of class con-
sciousness and labor radicalism ‘emerged and abated, depending on a
myriad of circumstances.’96 Like Thompson, he also claimed a certain license
to include almost any form of association, collaboration, and any kind of
protest, as evidence that workers were thinking and acting in new ‘class
ways’, and beginning to form a class.97 He therefore discussed the great
variety of political programmes that attracted them, including land and
currency reform, and producer co-operatives of various kinds, but was able to
feature only one authentic socialist ideologue, Thomas Skidmore, who called
for ‘a civil revolution’ and the equalization of all property relations. In fact,
few workers questioned private property per se, but many did claim that
labor was their property, and therefore often accused their entrepreneurial
masters of theft. Cumulatively, Wilentz thought, skilled workers in New
York City in the 1830s ‘fashioned a new language – and a new conscious-
ness – of social conflict … honed their own critique of capitalist wage labor’
and in his view mounted ‘as profound a critique of early industrial capital-
ism as any that appeared among the craft workers’ movements of Britain
and France in the 1830s’.98
Unlike Thompson, who was able to quote evidence from all over
England, Wilentz was unable to show that these workers were part of a
national class. His evidence was drawn solely from New York City, and he
was somewhat uncertain about how far he might generalize from it. He
noted that some New York unions took an active interest in working con-
ditions and strikes throughout the country, that they occasionally offered
assistance to strikers in nearby states, and helped to form a National Trades
Union in 1834, which was a ‘clearing house for reports’, and ‘added to the
national ferment’, so that it was ‘possible to see the New York journeymen
…. as part of a larger American working class, restricted neither to New
York, nor to the crafts.’99 However, he elsewhere stressed that New York
was ‘highly unusual’, cited Whitman’s remark that it was the ‘most radical
city’ in America, and in the end regretfully concluded that it is no more
than ‘an important part of the historical puzzle’, which might ‘suggest
ways in which class formation might be approached in other areas of the
country.’100
In 1837, however, the GTU, the organizational core of this class move-
ment, collapsed with the onset of a depression that was to continue for
seven years. Some craft societies survived, others later revived, and in the
late 1840s began to resume their strikes. In 1850, there occurred what
Wilentz called an ‘uprising’ by the ‘propertyless’, a strike of tailors that was
‘the bloodiest and most divisive … in antebellum urban American history’,
leaving two tailors killed and dozens wounded.101 Nonetheless, the class
unity and solidarity of the early 1830s were never recaptured. Although
new co-ordinating bodies emerged, they were quarrelsome, short-lived and
‘only the faintest echo of the GTU’. The strikes were mostly of ‘those trades
disrupted by structural change’, while those ‘unaffected remained relatively
quiet.’ Diverse groups of ‘subterranean radicals’ kept alive ‘the language of
class conflict, and some of ‘the old themes reappeared’, but many workers
had been ‘diverted’ into nativist, evangelical, temperance, land reform and
mutualist movements which were ‘not consistently focused on class
conflict’, indeed a number of them were explicitly against both strikes and
socialism. Some of this bewildering ‘mélange’ of new associations were
ethnically segregated. The labour movement’s ‘semblance of solidarity had
disappeared.’ It was ‘adrift’ and its ‘decay could not be arrested.’ Tammany
Hall, the headquarters of the Democratic Party in New York, later ‘picked
up the labour movement’s shattered remains’.102
The second attempt to form a class-wide labour movement in the United
States was launched by six Philadelphia garment cutters in 1869, who, after
disbanding their failed local craft union, decided to create a labor organ-
ization that would ‘bring together all wage earners in one great brother-
hood’ that they called the Knights of Labour.103 Initially, however, they
had some hesitation about admitting other trades, and unskilled workers,
but soon did so, and allowed their local ‘assemblies’ to be either ‘mixed’,
meaning open to any worker, or ‘trade’ meaning confined to workers of a
specified trade. The latter could remain affiliated with national craft
unions, and therefore hedge their bets on the Knights’ class aspirations.
Local assemblies were co-ordinated loosely via elected district assemblies
and a national convention or General Assembly, a form of organization
that allowed a great deal of local autonomy, as well as plenty of opportun-
ities for labour organizers’ entrepreneurial freelancing and power struggles.
By 1879, the Knights had over 9,000 members, and over next few years
spread to most major metropolitan areas of US, in some 12,000 assemblies.
Aided in particular by their success in organizing a strike against railroad
magnate Jay Gould, their membership soared to more than 100,000 in
1885. Engels portrayed the Knights as ‘a heaving, fermenting mass of
plastic material….the first national organization created by the American
working class as a whole … the raw material out of which the future of the
American working class movement, and along with it, the future of
American society at large, has to be shaped…’.104 Voss claimed that ‘For the
first time in American history, a national labor movement had been built
from the bottom up’, and she hailed their leader, Terence V. Powderly, as
‘labor’s first media superstar’.105
In 1884, however, against Powderly’s advice, many assemblies supported
the call for a one-day general strike on May 1st 1886 to obtain an eight-
hour day. As this campaign spread, membership was said to have reached
to three-quarters of a million. It was the Knights’ high point. Another strike
against Gould in the spring of March 1886 ended in utter defeat. On
May 4th, three days after the general strike had passed without incident or
effect, during a demonstration in Chicago to support the eight-hour day
campaign, a bomb exploded, injuring large numbers, and killing a police-
man. The police then opened fire on the demonstrators, killing and wound-
ing an unknown number. Despite the absence of any evidence linking the
Knights with the bomb, and Powderly’s condemnation of it, they were,
nonetheless, indelibly and fatally associated with it. Their membership
dropped sharply. Their leaders began to quarrel amongst themselves, embarked
on a number of ill-advised and poorly-organized strikes, and became embroiled
in a dispute with the newly-formed national craft union federation, the
AFL. By 1893 their membership was less than 83,000, and a few years later
‘the heaving, fermenting mass of plastic material’ had effectively disappeared,

though the Knights did not disband until 1917.
The third episode began in 1893 in Montana and Colorado with the
organization of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) by the charis-
matic ‘Big Bill’ Haywood which was initially a member of the AFL even
though it was more of an industrial than a craft union. In 1897, however,
their contempt for the craft demarcations and the policies of AFL unions
prompted their withdrawal, and the WFM then declared its goal of recruit-
ing all labor in the West ‘irrespective of occupation, nationality, creed or
color’. In 1905, an open meeting of unionists, radical activists, socialists
and anarchists in Chicago, chaired by Haywood, drew up a constitution of
‘One Big Union’, and that would ultimately organize ‘One Big Strike’ which
would bring capitalism to an end. It also approved an invitation to labor
unions and socialist parties in the U.S. and Europe to help found a revolu-
tionary labor movement on industrial lines, which was to be called the
Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, of which the WFM was ‘vir-
tually the only part that had any real existence.’106 The IWW became
known colloquially as the Wobblies.
They appear to have been strongly influenced by Confédération Générale
du Travail, and for the same reasons were no less prone than their French
model to doctrinal squabbles and schisms. From the very beginning, those
who thought they should engage in politics and elections were at odds
with those who considered elections a tool of capitalism, and favoured
direct action, in the form of strikes, demonstrations and sabotage. They
finally agreed to compromise, and do both, while not becoming attached
to any one political party. Like the CGT, the Wobblies seemed to have little
interest in creating permanent local organizations, so their membership
figures are not reliable, and again like the CGT, it attracted far more sym-
pathizers and supporters during strikes than were ever formally enrolled as
members. A number of these strikes were successful, most notably one on
behalf of Nevada gold miners for an eight-hour day. They achieved fame,
or notoriety, by being frequently involved in the courts. In 1907, Haywood
was tried, and acquitted, for the murder of the governor of Idaho, and in
1915 Joe Hill, an IWW organizer, was tried, convicted and executed, for
murdering a store owner during an armed robbery. In defiance of local
ordinances passed by several cities banning their speakers from public
meetings, the Wobblies organized a ‘free speech’ campaign, which often
led to violent confrontations with employers’ goons, the police and local
vigilantes. During one of them, in Everett, Washington, five Wobblies
were killed. Their most celebrated strike was that organized in January 1912
in support of the men, women and children who worked in the mills of
Lawrence, Mass, who were drawn from no less than 25 immigrant groups.
Their pay had been cut after the Massachusetts’ legislature reduced the
legal working week to 54 hours. When IWW brought supporters to the
town from New York and many other cities, violent confrontations fol-
lowed. After holding out through several wintry weeks, the IWW began to
evacuate the children of the strikers out of Lawrence, which provoked
further violence, but also press and public outrage against the employers,
who then caved in to the strikers’ demands.
During World War I the Wobblies opposed both the war and the draft,
and found themselves in head-on confrontation with the federal govern-
ment when they organized strikes in industries contributing to the war
effort. President Wilson authorized raids on their offices across the country,
which resulted in more than 100 IWW officers being charged with con-
spiracy to obstruct the war effort. In 1918 a jury found them guilty as
charged. Many received heavy prison sentences, though Haywood, free
pending an appeal, fled to Soviet Russia where he later died. His flight, the
imprisonment of other leaders, the huge fines and legal costs imposed
on the union, quarrels among the leaders who remained free, as well as
the adverse public image created by the trials, effectively killed off the
Wobblies, though they linger on to this day, as their website testifies.107
These three movements, the major episodes in the history of the American
working class up to World War I, show that its formation proceeded by
sudden, exhilarating surges of union organization, and perhaps also of class
consciousness, which rapidly subsided, leaving little permanent organ-
izational or institutional legacy for later generations. After its four years of
activism, the GTU had, Wilentz claimed, provided ‘blueprints’ of reform,
‘raised points that would remain important to labor movements over the
rest of the century’, and left ‘a legacy of battle, one that honored inde-
pendence, equality and commonwealth.’ That legacy cannot, however, have
been transmitted by the institution on which the inter-generational con-
tinuity of crafts has invariably depended, apprenticeship, for even in the
mid-1920s, before the GTU was founded, and could contribute to the pro-
cess of class formation, it had been reduced to ‘a glorified form of juvenile
wage labour.’108 ‘Subterranean radicals’, along with a few clubs and taverns,
seem to have been the only legatees, though since three-quarters of the
workforce from which the GTU was drawn were foreign-born, and no less
than 96% of the tailors who were at the centre of ‘the crisis’ of 1850 were
immigrants, one must suspect that the legacy that really mattered came
from Europe.109
The Knights’ failure seems to have been definitive and terminal. In Voss’
view America ‘has had weak working class institutions and politically con-
servative unions’ ever since.’110 It marked, she thought, the beginning of
American ‘exceptionalism’, that is of weak unions and feeble class solidarity.
The Wobblies’ cultural legacy was much the greatest of the three, since they
had shown that the unskilled, and apparently unorganizable migratory and
illiterate workers, even on the frontier, could be mobilized in strikes, and
that unions could be organized on industrial lines. Its public demonstrations
and sit-down strikes were to be imitated by the CIO in the 1930s. They also
showed that labor benefited when public opinion was on its side, as in
Lawrence in 1912, and paid dearly when it was not, as during World War I.
It also contributed a disproportionate share of martyrs, legends and folk
songs to organized labour. In the end, however, it is difficult to see these
three movements as cumulative steps which widened and deepened the
solidarity of the American working class.
None of the historians of these movements, one may first observe, men-
tion racial discrimination, or ethnic rivalries as a reason for their demise.
They seem to agree that all three movements were overwhelmed by the
strength of the opposition: from employers and the state or both. They
seldom mention public opinion. Wilentz decided that the GTU ‘could not
sustain itself in face of the intimidating superiority of police and employers
and the vicissitudes of the business cycle.’111 Voss argued that the Knights
collapsed because ‘American capital countered the labour movement with
effective organization of its own’ and that the class struggle waged in the
early 1880s had been won by employers before the end of the decade.112
After fully documenting the internal weaknesses and disputes of the Knights,
Weir came to a similar conclusion. The KOL ‘was done in by opposition,
not primarily by structural and ideological ineptitude. Even had it been a
flawless organization, filled with competent and altruistic leaders, it would
have struggled to overcome the fury of capital’s counterassault, the blows
delivered by its myriad enemies (including those within labor’s own ranks),
and from the hostility of the state, courts and the press.113 The Wobblies
similarly faced strong employer opposition, though its own decision to
engage in a direct confrontation, during a war, with the US government is
usually considered the fatal blow.114
As in any contest, however, the opposition that was too strong is not
easy to distinguish from the loser that was too weak. The collapse of all
three might equally well be attributed to their failure to engender the kind
of enduring and instinctive solidarity that came naturally to the one form
of organization that they all sought to transcend, or even destroy, the craft
union. Some of the in-built advantages of craft unions were mentioned
when discussing French unions and the one is only reminded of them
when considering the American. They were seldom riven by internal dis-
putes. They occasionally squabbled with one another, but had no reason to
compete for members, and were able to reconstruct themselves after the
worst setbacks. Hence despite all the adverse factors that ended these surges
of working class consciousness, they continued to grow. In 1881, they had
come together to form the American Federation of Labor, which had been
put on a permanent footing in 1886. They had watched the rise of the
Knights, with some apprehension, and their decline with relief. They had
survived the abuse and the organizing raids on their members by the
Wobblies, and by 1920 had recruited 18.7% of the labour force, a figure
which suggests that some of them at least had been recruiting unskilled
workers alongside their skilled members.115 Many of them were, however,
still elitist and exclusive, and still attached to their jurisdictions, and were
indifferent to the vast and still-growing unskilled labour forces of the new
mass-production industries: steel, automobiles and others. They had not, in
other words, escaped the elite enclave in which all labour movements
begin, and had not shown much inclination to organize American workers
as a whole, as a class.
Climax and decline
We have already observed how Russian skilled workers escaped from their
enclave, partly by the ferment of World War I, and more permanently by
Bolshevik force, though then only to a form of state captivity. French workers
escaped with some state aid in the form of the bourses du travail, but more
importantly of their own volition under the inspiration of revolutionary
ideals, and confirmed their resolve to abandon trade form of organization
at Amiens in 1906. State intervention also played a critical role in the
escape of American workers, which is something of a surprise, given that
we began this investigation of American classes by observing that the federal
government was reluctant to legislate in a manner that enabled any section
of the community to form a class. Organized labour is, however, something
of an exception, albeit only a temporary one. The decisive measure of state
support was the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932, sponsored by two Republicans,
Senator George Norris of Nebraska and Representative Fiorello H. LaGuardia
of New York, carried with overwhelming Congressional support, and signed
by a Republican president, Herbert Hoover, in 1932.
There were modest, but consistent, precedents for this legislation. Federal
government measures sympathetic to organized labour had started with
the Lloyd-LaFolette Act in 1912, which had made it easier for post office
employees to organize. It was followed by the Clayton Act of 1914 which
had exempted labor unions from the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust
Act, by the creation of the War Labor Board in 1917 which enforced pro-
union measures on all those doing business with the federal government,
(and seems to have been largely responsible for the increase of union mem-
bership from 9.4% of the labour force in 1910 to 18.7% in 1920), and by
the Railway Labor Act of 1926 which mandated collective bargaining on
railroads. These measures owed something to the lobbying efforts of the
AFL, and might be said to confirm that its bi-partisan political strategy paid
dividends for organized labour. However, the more important factor was
the steady shift in public opinion, as well as academic and even business
opinion, helped on by the World War and the Great Depression.
Before the Norris-LaGuardia Act, employers had, in practice, two methods
of resisting the unwelcome advances of organized labour: physical force or
injunctions. Injunctions were restraining orders which halted unions’ organ-

izing, picketing or strike activities, pending a full trial of the issues, and
were enforced by the courts, the police, and if need be, the army. How-
ever, since the enthusiasm of the moment is difficult to rekindle, they
usually brought union organizing efforts to a close. In the 1920s some
921 injunctions were issued during labour disputes – far more than in pre-
vious decades – leading union supporters to refer them derisively as ‘gov-
ernment by injunction’.116 Norris-LaGuardia was vitally important to unions
because it prohibited their use in labour disputes, both in state and federal
courts. It is therefore sometimes known as ‘the Anti Injunction Act’. It also
gave unions immunity from suits for damages; outlawed ‘yellow dog con-
tracts’, meaning those in which a worker agreed not to join a union as a
condition of employment; and confirmed employees’ freedom to form
labour unions without employer interference.
Norris-LaGuardia is sometimes seen merely as a preliminary to the strong
statement of employees’ right to bargain collectively through their own
freely chosen representatives in section 7a of the National Recovery Act in
the following year, and more decidedly to the National Labor Relations
(Wagner) Act of 1935 which required employers to bargain in good faith,
set up an enforcement agency to see that they did so, and to oversee union
representation elections. The National Recovery Act, however, was declared
unconstitutional in 1935, and the ‘Magna Carta of Labor’, as the Wagner
Act is sometimes called, proved, as we shall see, to be double-edged. Norris-
LaGuardia might well, therefore, be seen as the high point of state support
for union organization. In 1992, Geoghegan, a lifelong labour lawyer, went
so far as to say that ‘Norris-LaGuardia … created American labor….After the
Norris-LaGuardia law, there was no law at all. No injunctions. No U.S.
Army to enforce the injunctions. Nothing. It was a total vacuum. It was in
this total vacuum that the Big Bang occurred’, meaning the explosion of
union membership.117 The eight unions that led these organizing drives in
mass production industries formed a Committee for Industrial Organization
within the AFL but five of them declined to accept that the AFL as a whole
should determine how the new recruits should be affiliated to its member
unions, and then broke away to establish a new labour federation, the
Congress of Industrial Organization.118 In quick succession, they organized
new industrial unions, the Rubber Workers in 1934, the Autoworkers in
1936, the Communication Workers in 1939, and the Steelworkers in 1942.
Still more support from the state came during World War II, when gov-
ernment contractors were obliged to accept union organization of their
labour forces. The rate of unionization therefore increased rapidly, and
reached a peak in 1954, when just over 35% of the non-agricultural labour
force was organized.119 In 1955, the AFL and CIO buried past animosities
and merged. Finally, therefore, after three failed attempts, organized labour
had broken out of its craft enclave, created a united national organization
which counted for something in the nation’s industrial and political life,
could generally rely on the support a national political party, the Democrats,
and therefore might reasonably be said to have transformed itself into a
class movement.
Freeman provided a vivid account of the high water mark of this move-
ment, and of American working class consciousness in New York City in
the years immediately following World War II. He showed how the city
then ‘crackled with the political energy of a mobilized working class’, and
how organized labour ‘solidly established its presence’, and was accepted
as ‘a leading institutional force’ by the city’s political leaders.120 Union-
organized political rallies filled Madison Square Garden. There were fre-
quent organized parades, left-wing papers, clubs of all kinds, schools, resorts
and summer camps, a multitude of tenant and neighbourhood associa-
tions, and of fraternal and ethnic societies. Organized labour had persuaded
the City government to adopt ‘social democrat policies’ of various kinds,
such as rent controls, public housing, tuition-free colleges, free municipal
hospitals, public arts and recreation facilities, so that the public welfare pro-
visions in the city had ‘more in common with post-war European norms
than with the rest of the United States.’121 Throughout these post-war years,
organized labour remained ‘an unrivalled force for progressive change’, for
although unions sometimes engaged ‘in discriminatory practices that …
fragmented the working class and bred ethnic, racial and gender resent-
ment’, on most occasions ‘class transcended ethnic, racial and religious
loyalties.’ In 1945, the city had pioneered civil-rights legislation prohibit-
ing discrimination by race, creed, colour, or national origins.122
In his account of the emergence of the working class in the city more
than 100 years before, Wilentz had doubts about how typical or representa-
tive it might be. Freeman had none. He referred to its ‘foreignness’, and
described it as ‘in the United States but not of it’, less Protestant than
elsewhere, with fewer home owners, and a much higher proportion of
small businesses than cities of comparable size. It was ‘a non-Fordist city in
the age of Ford’, as he put it. It was also ‘more of a union town than any
other’, and its unions were, ‘more AFL than CIO’, meaning they were still
organized by trade, though these were often locals of industrial unions, cre-
ating a ‘hybrid craft-industrial structure.’123 Considerable ‘residential
bunching by occupation … deepened solidarities and contributed to class
consciousness and the strength of the labour movement’ which was fre-
quently demonstrated by strikes, during which other New Yorkers generally
respected their picket lines.124 It was also, of course, still a city of immi-
grants and their children. In 1950, first and second generation white immi-
grants were a majority of the city’s inhabitants, which tends to confirm
the suspicion prompted by Wilentz’s account of the city in the 1830s, that
its exceptional class consciousness was continuously replenished from
Europe.125
Freeman went on to show how New York’s ‘exceptionalism’ came to

an end over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Starting with a fiscal
crisis in 1975, which threatened the City with imminent bankruptcy,
welfare and social democratic programs of all kinds were drastically cut,
and unions and other New Yorkers alike were obliged to accept ‘that the
market would better serve the public than the government.’126 Labor
unions were forced to accept redundancies, and make concessions in pay
and conditions, to call off strikes, though ironically as their power receded,
their own massive pension funds became the financial mainstay of the city
when Wall St declined to invest in the city’s bonds.127 More or less simul-
taneously, the ethnic composition of the city also began to change. ‘The
post-1965 wave’ of immigrants were, as we noted earlier, more interested in
ethnic politics and devoted more of their energies to cross-class ethnic asso-
ciations, which undermined labor unity, and ‘overweighed working class
identification.’128 New York also began to look more like other cities, as
national retail and fast food chains advanced into it, and New Yorkers ‘of
varied economic backgrounds became more likely to shop in the same
stores, buy the same things, and eat in the same restaurants.’129 At the end
of it all, the working class ‘no longer formed the heart of the city’. In spite
of ‘the continued presence of a huge working population and a still power-
ful labor movement – the notion of a working class had virtually dis-
appeared from public discourse, popular culture, and the mental maps New
Yorkers had of the city.’ In part, this may have been because ‘the white
light of new money, radiating from Wall Street, made other economic
groupings look pale, difficult to discern’, but it was also because ‘for
decades there had been a national predilection to spurn the language of
class’, a predilection shared by the AFL-CIO.130
At some distance, New York City, was only following national trends.131
For labor unions, these had been almost unrelentingly downhill ever since
the mid-1950s. By 2004 union membership had fallen to 12.2% of the
labour force, and only two pockets of higher unionization survived: in the
public sector where 36.4% were unionized, and in transportation and util-
ities with 24.9%. Even the construction industry, once famed for its strong
unions, had become largely non-union with a mere 14.7%.132 Comparison
with Canada and other industrial societies suggests that this decline had
little or nothing to do with structural changes in the American economy.133
There were three more probable causes: first, the kind of union, and union-
ism that had developed in the United States as a result of the Wagner Act
and subsequent amendments to it; second, the steady evaporation of elec-
toral and public support for labor unions; and third, the continuous expan-
sion of the alternative to the collective betterment promised by labour
unions to which we have already referred – provided by schools and col-
leges. Each deserves a brief comment, since the fate of unions is the best
guide we have to the fate of the American working class.
The Wagner Act in 1935, the supposed ‘Magna Carta’ of organized labour,
which its supporters had hoped would provide permanent legal protection
both for organizing unions and for collective bargaining created a legal
framework for regulating labour relations. It therefore brought to an end
the brief period of extra-legal freedom, comparable to that long enjoyed by
British trade unions, that had been provided by the Norris-LaGuardia Act
three years before, and, by contrast with it, imposed legal requirements
while providing legal protection. In so doing, it shifted the task of recruit-
ing members from the shopfloor, from picket lines, sit-down strikes
and mass meetings, to the hearing rooms of the National Labor Relations
Board (NLRB), to elections organized by the NLRB, and required the inter-
mediation of lawyers.134 The NLRB soon decided that it would give no pref-
erence to the one proven foundation of worker solidarity, their craft or
skill, that it would not allow craft secessions from recognized bargaining
units, and that the ‘wishes of employees cannot be determinative’ of its
bargaining unit decisions.135 American workers were thereby denied the
right of deciding the basis on which they would organize and negotiate, a
curious, and seldom noticed, limitation of the rights of American employees,
which smacks more of Soviet trade unions than of western democracies.
French and English employees were never restrained in this manner.136
Moreover, after the end of the World War II, the Federal government did
not remain consistently supportive of organized labour, nor did the rest of
American civil society. The Wagner Act was amended by the Taft-Hartley
Act of 1947, and then by the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1953, in ways which
made it far easier for employers to delay, divert, and defeat union organ-
izing campaigns which, with the help of their lawyers, they quickly learned
how to do.
Gross thought that the political composition of the NLRB made a differ-
ence, and that, despite Taft-Hartley, Democratic appointees sought to live
up to Wagner’s original hope of promoting industrial democracy via collec-
tive bargaining, while Republican appointees used Taft-Hartley to protect
the rights of individual employees to refrain from collective bargaining,
and thereby helped employers undermine Wagner’s original intent.137It
may be that there was a difference of this kind, though since two Demo-
cratic presidents, Carter and Clinton, did not lead to any significant halt in
the decline of union membership, one cannot help but think that the die
was cast once the determination of the bargaining unit was determined by
quasi-legal procedures before the NLRB, and especially after it decided to
define bargaining units by criteria it deemed appropriate rather than by
the wishes of workers themselves. This enabled employers to bring their
superior legal firepower, as well their specialist union-busters, to help defeat
organizing drives. Their impact is difficult to measure, and we will only
observe that the steady decline in union membership dates from the
mid-1950s i.e. not long after the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947, and that
lawyers and consultants employed to resist unions prospered mightily,

presumably because they had proved to be effective.138
The second reason for unions’ decline was the loss of electoral support
and public sympathy.139 This can be attributed first of all to the fact that
the new industrial unions no longer had defined jurisdictions as craft unions
had within the AFL, and therefore competed vigorously with each other,
sometimes violently, but no less keenly in the elections organized by the
NLRB. Apart from dissipating much of their energies, this inter-union com-
petition for the dues of potential members was not always an edifying
sight. Another reason why public support declined was that the democratic
institutions of the craft unions of the AFL were not feasible within CIO
unions trying to organize the diverse labour forces of entire industries.140
Industrial unions required business-like administrations, and soon came to
resemble the business organizations that they opposed, with career officials
and lawyers barely distinguishable from those on the other side of the
table. Most union leaders didn’t look as if they had toiled and suffered
alongside their members for very long. One later leader, César Chávez,
founder of the United Farm Workers had, and as a result earned a great deal
of public sympathy. But he was a deviant. Deprived of the constant account-
ability of craft unions, the new industrial unions were also prone to cor-
ruption, both from employers, and from specialists in another kind of
protection, the mafia. In sum, labor unions were bitterly at odds with each
other, showed little respect for the democratic norms of the larger society,
and were prone to violence, racketeering and corruption. They could hardly,
therefore, retain the sympathy of the general public, or of politicians. Nor
could they present themselves, or be taken seriously, as the collective con-
science of the American working class.
In 1995 Gross noted the ‘extraordinary reversal of public perception’
so that labor unions, ‘seen by many as liberating forces of social and eco-
nomic justice in the 1930s, have come to be commonly regarded as instru-
ments of oppression and exploitation.’141 He thought the televised hearings
of the Senate ‘Labor Rackets Committee’ in 1957 were a watershed in this
respect, and that ‘unions have never shaken free of the images created in
the McClellan committee hearings.’142 Lipset and Schneider analysed a
variety of opinion poll data through 1966 to 1981, and showed that, though
they ‘have the largest mass membership of any organization’ in the United
States, and though there was ‘widespread support for the principle of unions’,
labor unions were found to be ‘the least trusted major institution in American
life’, and that their leadership was ‘widely believed be exceptionally corrupt
and unethical.’143
The final blow to union and class solidarity came from the rapid expan-
sion of higher education, to which we have often had reason to refer.
During the war the Federal Government had given strong support to the
unions, but when it came to an end, it gave a tremendous boost to its rival
in the form of the GI Bill, which guaranteed financial support for any veteran
who wanted to go to college. College enrolments thereafter increased, as
remorselessly it seemed as union enrolments declined. In 1990, the pro-
portion of American schoolchildren going on to some form of higher edu-
cation passed 50%, and ‘going to college’ came to be seen as the essential
first step for everyone who hoped to make something of their life.144 In
fieldwork in the summer of 1970, Ruttenberg found some union members
and officers in the Baltimore area who were less than fully committed to it.
While supporting free education for all, including college, his union infor-
mants ‘felt no obligation to provide college education for their own chil-
dren’, prompting Ruttenberg to think college education was still ‘a middle
class or upper-class value’.145 They must have been an exception. Not long
afterwards, Rainwater found that working class people ‘feel pressured by
the rest of society, which continually emphasizes the value, the desirability,
the moral superiority of college education….Until now they have regarded
college as for the mobile young man’, but they were ‘no longer surprised
that many people from their group attend college.’146
This pressure from ‘the rest of society’ has evidently been stronger than
the pressure unions have applied to persuade workers to come together to
improve their lot collectively. While college has become a near-universal
aspiration which defines mainstream American society, the values of the
labour movement have become strangely at odds with it. After more than
three decades as a labour lawyer, Geoghegan looked back and asked himself
why he had committed his life to the labor cause. He recollected that when
he was a student in the 1960s, organized labour had, even then, ‘the appeal
of stepping into some black hole in American culture, with all the American
values except one: individualism.’ Thirty years later he reflected, ‘here, in
this black hole, paunchy, middle aged men, slugging down cans of beer,
come to hold hands, touch each other, and sing “Solidarity Forever.” O.K.,
that hardly ever happens, but most people in this business, somewhere, at
some point, see it once, and it is the damnedest, un-American thing you
will ever see. Two or three days later, you will not even believe you saw it.
I had to see it twice before I could believe I saw it once…. Solidarity….The
very idea of it is gone, blanked out from the disconnected halves of our
labor union brains….It is the love, the only love left in this country that
dare not speak its name.’ Organized labour, he went on, ‘thinks of itself,
consciously, as American as apple pie. But it is not. Go to any union hall,
any union rally, and listen to the speeches. It took me years to hear it, but
there is a silence, a deafening Niagara-type silence, on the subject of indi-
vidualism. No one is against it, but it never comes up. Is that America?
To me, it is like Spain.’147
The three earlier episodes in the formation of the American working class
left the impression that class solidarity and consciousness were intermittent
and ephemeral, moods rather than a mindset. The final climactic episode
following the formation of the CIO during which unions finally organized
a large proportion of workers, and its later merger with the AFL, does not
erase this impression. The surge of working class consciousness and solidar-
ity that accompanied it was longer, and more national, and suggested that
class might become a permanent reference point in the lives of American
workers, and in the American polity and society more generally. After just
two decades, however, the organized core of the working class began to
crumble, and class solidarity receded yet again and all but disappeared,
even in New York City.
Searching for class distinctions in everyday life
Unions may be the best indication of working class solidarity, but it is

possible, I suppose, that as they waxed and waned class entered the normal
routines of everyday life of American workers, unionized or not. Anthro-
pologists and sociologists who have lived in ordinary, small-sized com-
munities, and observed and recorded their social life enable us to test this
idea. There are many such studies, but two are especially revealing, because
they were both conducted during the decades of mass union organization,
that is to say precisely when one might have expected commitment to their
class to have been strongest, and also because they both have been subject
to follow-up studies some decades later, which therefore provide some
check on the observations and predictions of the original researchers.
The first, that of the Lynds, is perhaps the most celebrated. They studied
‘Middletown’ (Muncie, Indiana) on two occasions, first in 1924 when it
had some 36,000 inhabitants, again in 1935–36 when the population had
grown to some 50,000. We will concentrate on their second study, which
the Lynds began with high hopes that they would witness the formation of
a working class. At one point they observed that ‘the more active role of
the Federal government since 1933, coupled with the fact that some result-
ing legislation has been of benefit to workers, has introduced a potential
line of division in outlook’, which they thought might become significant
in the future. They went on to observe that Middletown’s ‘business class
feels bitterly that the Federal government is … playing against us’, and they
detected ‘the first faint awareness’ amongst some of Middletown’s workers
that government ‘instead of being simply a miscellaneous ally of everybody
in general, may actually be able to do things for “us”, even if need be
against “them.”’ As their studies proceeded, however, the Lynds were to
be disappointed, observing at one point that ‘… the sprawled inertness of
Middletown working class opinion – as over against the more vocal and
coherent opinion of the business class – may conceivably take shape slowly
in a self-conscious sharpening of class lines. But neither class morale, sources
of information, nor personal leadership for such a development is apparent
at present among Middletown’s working class.’148
When they directly posed questions about class, and sought to discover
whether Middletowners themselves thought that the distance between
business people and workers had widened, they found that business people
‘seemed uneasy in the face of such a question, and one got the distinct
impression that they do not like to think of “classes” and feel happier
ignoring the possibility of their existence.’ Middletown’s working class,
likewise, ‘does not, for the most part, spend its time thinking of itself as dif-
ferent from people on the North Side’ – the better part of town. ‘In the
main, it has followed the same symbols, trying intermittently, as work
allows, to affirm them as loudly as does the business class, and to narrow
the gap between symbol and reality. Hence, a large degree of unconscious-
ness as to class … was … a marked characteristic of Middletown’s working
class even in the sixth year of a great depression. To most of its people, there-
fore, “class differences” and “class consciousness” are vague, unfamiliar and, if
recognized, unpleasant and sinister terms.’149
The evidence they presented on the unionization of Middletown’s labour
force was consistent with this conclusion. The rate appears to have fallen
over the first decades of the century, and by 1929 only about 900 of the
13,000 manual labour force were members of 16 locally-chartered unions,
most of them skilled workers in the building, metal-working and printing
trades, but these were ‘mainly negligible minority groups in the industrial
life of the city.’ Most workers in its large automobile and glass-making
plants were unorganized, save for a few skilled moulders and pattern-
makers. Businessmen were pleased to describe Middletown as ‘open-shop’.
As a result of unemployment, the number declined still further in 1933,
though a number of organizing drives – benefiting from Norris LaGuardia –
suddenly more than tripled the number to 2,800 in 1934, and for a few
months a labor newspaper was published. By 1935, however, it had fallen
back again to about 1,000, notwithstanding the Wagner Act.
While the business class, and one of the local newspapers, were over-
joyed by the unions’ failure to hold on to their initial gains, neither the
union organizers themselves, nor the Lynds, attributed it primarily to the
efforts of the business class. They blamed instead the intense competition
between the AFL and CIO unions, and the unscrupulous behaviour of some
organizers, which meant that unions were soon being described by workers
as ‘rackets’.150 They referred to the botched and clumsy efforts of the crafts-
men who dominated the Central Labor Union, the co-ordinating body of
unions in the town, to take advantage of the National Recovery Act and
‘build – against the traditions of the local culture and the will of the busi-
ness class – control mechanisms’ and ‘a large and powerful labor organ-
ization’, which is to say, a unified class organization. The Lynds thought
their efforts created only ill-will amongst new and potential members.151
The fear and insecurity of many workers therefore remained ‘largely an
individual experience for each worker, and not a thing generalized by him
into a “class” experience.’ Neither union organizers nor the Lynds sug-
gested, by the way, that discrimination against Afro-Americans, of which
they found a good number of cases, or of ethnic tensions, of which they
found far fewer, were in any way responsible for this state of affairs. Union
activity does not appear to have had the least effect on voting behaviour.
In the election of 1936 there were no sharp cleavages along class lines.
Some 47% of the votes in the precincts the Lynds defined as those of ‘the
business class’ went for Roosevelt. Workers in the town showed no inclina-
tion to form a Labor Party. A motion to that effect was voted down at an
AFL meeting by 20 to 1, and other radical parties appealing specifically to
workers were widely disliked.152
When the Lynds tried to describe the class structure of Middletown as a
whole, they faced considerable difficulties, and their picture of it is neither
clear nor unambiguous. What emerges is a rather unstable, differentiated
hierarchy of ‘groups’ rather than of classes, and there is no trace of class
conflict. They portrayed one family in the town as ‘a reigning royal family’
and placed it at the centre of an ‘inner business control group’, though
another scarcely less wealthy family had opted out of civic affairs. At one
point, they noticed ‘an old middle class of wealthy local manufacturers,
bankers and the local head managers of one or two of the national cor-
porations … and one or two outstanding lawyers’, which was, they thought,
‘becoming an upper class’, and separating from the larger group ‘of smaller
manufacturers, merchants and professional folk, and the salaried depen-
dants of the city’s big-business interests’, and from the minor employed
professionals, very small retailers, entrepreneurs, clerks, small salesmen
and civil servants. At other times, however, they identified ‘all business
and professional people as a single middle class group’, and recorded ‘the
impression … based upon frankly tenuous data and brief observation of
the crystallizing of a “middle class”.’153 Under the business class, upper
class and differentiated middle class, they identified an upper group of the
working class, ‘an aristocracy of labour, foremen, building trades craftsmen
and highly skilled machinists’, and below them the semi and unskilled
workers, machine operatives, truckmen, labours and the mass of wage
earners. Finally, they put a ‘ragged bottom margin’, comprising some ‘poor
whites’ from Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginian mountains, … the
type of white worker who lives in the ramshackle, unpainted cottages on
the outlying unpaved streets, and is without regular employment.’154
One cannot quarrel with their categorization, or with the names they
chose to apply to them. Sociologists, after all, are free to categorize popu-
lations as they wish, but it is clear that their terms were not utilized or
preferred by Middletowners themselves. And though the Lynds thought
‘the scene had been set for the emergence of class consciousness and poss-
ibly eventual conflict’, even for ‘class explosions’ in the future, since ‘mil-
itant working class organization’, was ‘so basically foreign to the present
population of Middletown’ they thought it would more probably be ‘dif-

fused from larger industrial centers.’155 They were to be disappointed, for a
follow-up study of the town by Caplow and Chadwick some 40 years later
in 1976, found that classes had neither emerged spontaneously nor been
diffused from elsewhere. Most of the very few attitudinal and the behav-
ioural differences that the Lynds could mention to support a basic two-class
division between business and working class had disappeared. ‘There has’,
Caplow and Chadwick concluded, ‘been a real convergence of life-styles,
and if the watershed between the two major classes in Middletown still
exists, it is so eroded by now that its eventual disappearance does not seem
unlikely.’156
In 1939, four years after the Lynds’ investigations in Middletown came to
an end, another participant observer, James West, commenced a two-year
investigation of a much smaller Midwest town to the south of Middletown,
which he called Plainville. It had a population of only 275, but it is impor-
tant in the present context because West thought he had found what had
eluded the Lynds, namely a fully-formed ‘class system’, even though ini-
tially he had deliberately chosen a town that was ‘as “level” as possible
socially and economically’, and which at first sight had ‘no recognized
“aristocracy” or other well-defined social “classes,” a community where
people were all living as nearly as possible on the same social and financial
plane.’157 In short, he claimed he had found classes in a town that was, at
first sight, classless. His findings therefore appeared all the stronger, and all
the more startling, which is presumably what he hoped. Everything hinges,
of course, on what he took to be a class.
West claimed that the ‘class system’ of Plainville, ‘might well be called a
“super-organization” because it provides for every person living there a
master pattern for arranging their lives, according to relative rank every
other individual, and every family clique, lodge, club, church, and other
organization or association in Plainville society.’158 Somewhat disappoint-
ingly, if one is hoping to draw national implications, the ‘only exceptions
are the Republican and Democratic parties.’ However, he felt able to add
that ‘important social discriminations are involved’ in party affiliation.159
He then distinguished an upper class, which ‘includes about half the people
in the community’, and ‘the other half belong to the lower class’ and claimed
that all social groups could be placed in this 50–50 ‘class system’.160
He meant, of course, that they could by placed by him in this ‘class
system’. Plainvillers themselves, however, clearly did not accept this two-
class system as a point of reference in their lives. On the contrary, as West
admitted, they denied the existence of class altogether. The ‘upper class
prides itself on being average, and no member would admit to upper crust
classification for himself or for his family’, and the lower class was no
more anxious to recognize itself as a class. Hence, although Plainvillers
invidiously distinguished and ranked one another, they did not do so
according to the ‘master pattern’ that was so clear in West’s mind. Relative
rank remained relative rank. They had many different views about what
West, but not Plainvillers, called ‘the class system’, and West provided dia-
grams of four of their main ones, which varied according to the religious
affiliation of the respondents, though as he admitted, to ‘tell how “every-
body sees the classes” would of course require many diagrams, because the
tradition of denying class enables individuals to attach more weight to one
criterion than to another.’161
Another anthropologist, Gallaher, returned to study Plainville 15 years
later, and found it impossible to find West’s two classes. Plainvillers, as he
put it, ‘do not use labels with sufficient consistency, applied to a specific
group of people, to warrant their use for classificatory purposes.’ He found
that most of them agreed ‘on what constitutes a desirable style of life’, and
of course, that they differed in their access to it. Gallaher also found that
West’s conclusion that ‘every friendship clique, lodge, club, church and
other organization could be ranked according to its position within the
social stratification system’ was still ‘partly true’, but he preferred to describe
this as ranking ‘along a continuum of imperceptible gradation between two
extremes. While these extremes are identifiable, he decided ‘the bulk of
Plainville’s families’ lie in between.’162
Gallaher then proceeded to identify the criteria by which individuals are
assigned to different status ranks, continuously emphasizing that these are
‘not two rigidly or clearly distinguished lifestyles’, and do not provide a
basis for any collective consciousness, loyalty or recognition as a class.
While not wishing to contradict West directly, whose work had in the
interim become a minor classic, he observed, that ‘possibly there was a
system of dual social classes in 1939, and that these ‘may have split unevenly
along the hill-prairie residence dichotomy’ which West had emphasized.
But he could not ‘definitely conclude that there were classes’ of the kind
West described, ‘as clearly crystallized and tightly structured, with bound-
aries almost caste-like’, because he ‘found the hill-prairie residence criterion
(was) no longer a basis of prestige, and the value differences formerly attached
to these two ways of life largely levelled into a common system.’163 In the
end, he wondered whether West had actually observed ‘an incipient class
structure which, because of the many changes he has described never fully
crystallized.’ His conciliatory conclusion was that West’s ‘analysis of Plainville
social stratification … might have been more meaningful if viewed in a
status rank conceptual framework rather than that of social class…. Certainly,
I found no clearly established system of classes.’164
Thus these studies of two Midwestern communities do not provide much
support for the idea that Americans saw themselves as living in class-
divided communities, or that class provided a clear reference point in their
lives, even though they were conducted during a surge of union organ-
ization, and even though their authors anticipated and hoped they would.
The follow-up studies provided even less. Hence if we still hope to identify
national classes and class cleavages, we have one more option, national survey
data, which is not only more recent, but also more certainly representative of
the entire United States.
Kingston reviewed a vast amount of data of this kind, and failed to find
any classes, other that is, than those defined by researchers. Classes, he
observed, are not demographically well-defined or readily distinguished
groups, since ‘individuals do not usually, much less routinely, inherit their
class positions, and very often, they belong to different classes over their
working lives.’165 He gave considerable attention to Davis’s research which
showed that members of conventionally-defined classes, net of education,
do not have distinctive beliefs, customs, values and morals, and therefore
reasonably concluded that class cultures did not exist.166 This is not to sug-
gest that the beliefs, customs, values of Americans are randomly distributed,
or that their life styles are indistinguishable from one another, or that, for
example, audiences of the Lincoln Center or visitors to the Guggenheim
are a representative cross-section of the population of New York City.
Members of the higher managerial class are, Kingston pointed out, more
likely to prefer classical music, and blue collar and routine white collar
workers are more likely to prefer country and western. But how illuminat-
ing is it, he asked, to say there is a class difference between them in this
respect, when classical music is preferred by only a tiny minority of the
higher managerial class, and the majority, by a margin of two to one, prefer
country and western?
By every other criterion by which we might reasonably hope or wish to
distinguish classes nationally, Kingston showed the evidence does not permit
us to do so. Classes do not, for instance, have distinctive patterns of social
association. They do not have distinctive family structures, or behave in
distinctive ways within the family, or have distinctive patterns of religious
belief or observance, and class counts for little as predictor of political ori-
entation, and in many respects ‘borders on the irrelevant.’167 He does not,
for a moment, wish to deny that there are many differences and inequal-
ities among Americans, but only to say that these are finely differentiated
by social status rather than segmented by class, and that they are better
explained by education than by class membership. The only traces of class
formation that Kingston detected were among the contemporary survivors
of the two groups that we noted earlier had been deprived of their class-
forming potential by political action: professionals and skilled workers.
These two groups, above all others, were likely to remain in the same occu-
pation all their lives, and therefore to remain members of the same class,
whatever it may be called.168 Everyone else was more likely to be upwardly
or downwardly mobile, and therefore ‘very often “belong” to different
classes over the course of their lives’. Contemporary survey research on
behaviour therefore points in the same direction as the field research of
communities. Classes may be defined by researchers however they wish,

but Americans themselves seem ill-inclined to recognize or live by them.
A minority of attitude surveys seem to contradict this conclusion, since
they have found that substantial proportions of the American population
were at least willing to identify themselves as working class. In 1947, for
example, Centers found that about half of his representative sample did so.
He went on to claim that Americans ‘had become class conscious, and a
part of them, calling themselves the working class, have begun to have atti-
tudes and beliefs at variance with traditional acceptances and practices.’169
He had, however, no longitudinal evidence to support the tenses used in
this remark, or his implicit promise of things to come. In 1983, Jackman
and Jackman also found that over a third of their national sample described
themselves as working class.170 However, at the very beginning of this
investigation, we found reason to wonder what behavioural conclusions
might be drawn from attitude surveys of this kind, and the doubts persist.
Everything seems to hinge on the format of the questions asked. In 1979,
Scholzman and Verba confirmed these doubts by comparing open-ended
and fixed-choice questionnaires. They found that, while only 8% of blue
collar workers spontaneously identified themselves as working class in an
open-ended questionnaire, when they forced their respondents to choose,
they could make 23% of them do so.171 When presented with an open
choice, 62% of blue collar workers in their sample identified themselves as
middle class. Such ‘incorrect’ self-identification is commonplace in ques-
tionnaires in the United States, as we have seen.172 Most open-choice atti-
tude surveys suggest that most Americans are reluctant to distinguish either
a working class or an upper class from a vast, amorphous vaguely-defined
middle class to which they think they themselves belong.173 Like most of
Rainwater and Coleman’s respondents, they tend to see class as ‘an almost
infinitely graded hierarchy – a continuum as it were – rather than a series
of discrete groups’, and they distinguish positions along this continuum
by income level and lifestyle.174 After reviewing these and many other
studies, Kingston concluded. ‘Very few Americans spontaneously claim to
be working class. That term doesn’t readily cross Americans’ lips.’175
There is, however, a near-equivalent word that does more often pass their
lips, or so Halle concluded after seven years participant observation at an oil
refinery in New Jersey over the years 1974–1981. He had observed that while
blue collar workers at the refinery ‘rarely’ referred to themselves as ‘working
class’, many of them frequently used the term ‘working man’.176 None of
them ‘ever disputed the appropriateness of the term, and almost everyone at
some point used the term … most men do so regularly, though sometimes
they talk about “working guy”, occasionally “working slob”, or working stiff”.
Since he could cite no less than eight earlier field studies that also mentioned
the use of this term, there is some justice in his generalization that ‘in America
workers commonly refer to themselves as “working men.”’177
His careful analysis of the connotations attached to the term by his co-
workers, indicated that they thought that ‘working men’ were those whose
jobs involved physical, dangerous or dirty routine work, whom they distin-
guished from those in white collar and professional occupations, especially
those they thought did no productive work, and were overpaid, in particu-
lar lawyers. They also distinguished working men from the unemployed,
from the poor, and from those who do not want to work, all of whom they
commonly saw as synonymous, and towards whom most of them were
equally hostile. Moreover, ‘working man’ was, Halle insisted, a job specific
term, and did not allow one to predict common interests, concerns and
ways of life beyond the workplace. This rather disqualifies his co-worker
subjects as members of a working class, since it was precisely a wider sense
of common interests and lifestyle that we originally suggested defined
classes, so that their members are, as we put it, more likely ‘to interact more
readily with one another than with other members of their society, to
respond to political, economic and social changes in a similar manner, to
find similar ideals and ideologies appealing, and over time, to form distinc-
tive sub-cultures and communities.’
The distinction drawn between ‘workingmen’ and others by refinery workers
in New Jersey in 1977 did not differ greatly from that used by the original
workingmen’s movement in the 1820s and 1830s, as Halle himself noted.
The secretary of the General Trades’ Union which had co-ordinated the
emergence of the working class in New York in 1830s as described above,
had declared that ‘true unions should embrace every citizen whose daily
exertions, from the highest Artist to the lowest Labourer, are his means of
subsistence’. The secretary of the Boston Trades’ Union formed in the fol-
lowing year, argued that ‘there are but two parties in our country … all
who labor whether as boss or journeyman, and the rich men, the profes-
sional men and all who now live, or who intend hereafter to live, without
useful labor, depending on the sweat of their neighbour’s brow for
support.’178 The Working Men’s Parties excluded only ‘lawyers, gamblers,
bankers and liquor dealers’.179 The Knights were similarly ‘open to all
working people except for bankers, lawyers, stockbrokers, doctors and
liquor manufacturers’.180 Over very long periods of time, therefore, working
men’s perceptions of their class appear to have remained blurred and
imprecise. Any account of America’s classes would, it seems, have to place,
alongside an ill-defined, unorganized middle class, an occasional or epi-
sodic working class, that failed either to create enduring, national insti-
tutions or to distinguish itself very clearly from the sprawling middle class.
In all probability, many of those, like Centers, who have insisted on the
basis of opinion surveys that American workers have a considerable degree
of class consciousness would not disagree with this conclusion, since they
did not deny that there has been little overt expression of working class
solidarity, or that social conflicts have seldom been conducted in class
terms. Centers himself admitted that working class consciousness in 1947

was restricted to ‘a narrow political-economic compass’, which he attri-
buted to weak unions and the absence of a political party ready to mobilize
the working class. Jackman and Jackman also noted the failure of the ‘party
system … to provide a clear electoral outlet for distinctive class views’.
Wright similarly acknowledged the lack of any overt and organized class
consciousness, which he attributed to weak unionism and the moderation
of the Democratic Party.181
These observers have, what we might call, a sleeping princess view of the
American working class. While their surveys demonstrate, to their satis-
faction at least, that a working class exists, it has never received the kiss of
life from political parties, pressure groups or unions. The conclusion of the
present argument is that while inequalities and injustices that are the raw
materials of class formation are always available in the United States as
everywhere else, political action is not merely the kiss that finally brings a
class to life, but rather the starting point of class formation. Without it,
there is no princess.
Civic upper classes and aristocracies
When we turn to consider whether there has been, or is, an upper or ruling
class in the United States we must first recognize that if capitalist market
forces were alone sufficient to make an upper or ruling class, then they
would surely have least difficulty in doing so in the United States. It had no
land-owning ruling class, with nationally-recognized hereditary political
privileges, or distinctive institutions, titles and manners, to impede or
obscure the emergence of a class based exclusively on the accumulation
of industrial capital. Its history begins, as Engels put it, ‘with the elements
of modern bourgeois society.’ The strong support for individual property
rights enshrined in the federal constitution has restrained public ownership
so that private capital in the United States has never been counter-balanced
by a large public sector as in other industrial democracies. In recent decades,
the level of inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth have
steadily increased, without apology or embarrassment, blithely indifferent
to Kuznets’ curve, to reach levels which are part of Europe’s long-forgotten
past.182 Moreover, the first amendment to the constitution has ensured that
wealth enjoys almost unlimited advantages in influencing the electoral
process, so that it is not uncommon for multi-millionaires to be competing
for the people’s votes. Cumulatively, all these things ought to provide the
most favourable environment imaginable for the formation of a capitalist
upper or ruling class. But does it exist? Has it ever existed?
In 1830, Tocqueville observed the dumbing effects of monotonous, unskilled
labour in early American factories, and the ever-increasing inequality between
‘the class of workmen and the class of masters … one born to obey … the
other to command’, and decided that capitalism was leading the young
American republic ‘away from democracy and back towards aristocracy.’
On reflection, however, he decided that this ‘class of masters’ was a new
and rather strange sort of aristocracy, ‘since it is not inherited, and may not
continue indefinitely’ since employers often went bankrupt. Moreover,
American workers were not permanently tied to any particular employer,
and ‘may be dependent on a master but not on any particular master.’ In
the end, therefore, he decided that though the new aristocracy which he
observed in America was ‘one of the harshest that ever existed’, it was also
‘one of the most confined and least dangerous’ and that ‘the wealthy man-
ufacturers do not really constitute a class, since they have no feelings or
purposes, no traditions or hopes, in common; there are individuals there-
fore, but no definite class.’183
Sociological research on American communities in the mid-twentieth
century came to a rather different conclusion. In an analysis of eight such
studies, including the Lynds, Polsby noted a consensus that a homoge-
neous upper class ruled these communities, and exerted, in its own interest,
an all-purpose power over a wide variety of local issues.184 Social conflict in
them all was therefore, their authors claimed, primarily between the ruling
upper and the lower classes. Polsby was, however, far from persuaded that
the evidence they had collected supported this consensus. There was, he
observed, a certain arbitrariness in deciding the membership of this sup-
posed ruling class, and the community issues that were supposed to demon-
strate their power. When, for example, the putative ruling class did not
prevail over the objections of others, the issues were often defined as ‘trivial’.
Some researchers claimed that the dominant business group could ‘poten-
tially’ exercise decisive power, even though it did not actually do so, and
that though ‘apparently powerless’ it remained powerful because of its ‘stra-
tegic position’, or that its power was exercised behind the scenes, where
things were exactly the opposite of what they seemed, and where, of course,
the researcher could not observe them.
Polsby went on to suggest that these arguments were not the result of the
political views or prejudices of their authors, but necessary consequences of
the stratification theory embedded in their analyses.185 Everyone in the
community was assumed to belong to one layer of the stratification system,
and since the researcher invariably took wealth, income or status as an
index of the power of each class to realize its will over the objections of
others, there had always to be, by definition, a reasonably stable top layer.
Having differentiated their communities in this manner, everything else
necessarily followed: the upper class must rule because it was at the top of
the economic and status hierarchy, its power must be as stable and continu-
ous as its wealth, while groups organized on some basis other than class
must be less significant, even invisible, and the conflicts they engaged in
must be marginal. The possibility that groups of the more numerous lower
classes might have more power in aggregate, and get together and on occa-
sion outvote the upper class, must also be ignored. In Polsby’s view, there-
fore, these studies gave a distorted view of the exercise of power in American
communities. He ended by calling for an entirely different research strategy
to identify the distribution of power in any community, one that focused
on ‘issue areas’, rather than simply on the economic resources of members
of various classes to which the researcher assigned his subjects.
A later study that is not open to Polsby’s objections is Jaher’s prodigious
research among the tax records, ‘civil lists’ of political office-holders and
appointees, as well as the records of political parties, companies, profes-
sional associations, cultural, charitable and other voluntary associations, and
churches and clubs in five cities – Boston, New York, Chicago, Charleston and
Los Angeles.186 These were supported by the records of births, marriages
and deaths which enabled him to trace the kin networks linking the eco-
nomic, political, and cultural elites. Jaher’s studies extended from the ear-
liest days of the five cities, meaning the colonial era in three of them, down
to the present day, meaning 1982. He satisfied Polsby’s standards, because
he frequently referred to ‘issue areas’ or policy decisions in each city.
In all five Jaher showed that those who first became the ‘economic
arbiters of their cities’ soon recognized that ‘political leverage aided entre-
preneurship’, and therefore established their ‘command over municipal
government’, which ‘at least for a time, was not effectively contested.’
Having integrated economic and political power, they also ‘took a pro-
prietary interest in their communities’, and became leaders of ‘urban
welfare and cultural institutions and programs.’ They assumed, therefore,
a ‘generalized hegemony’ on the basis of which Jaher reasonably felt
entitled to call them ‘an upper class’. In two of these cities, Charleston and
Boston, children of this upper class inherited this ‘generalized hegemony’,
and having benefited from ‘the essential aristocratic attribute of inter-
generational bequests of rank and role’ could, in Jaher’s view, justly be
called an ‘aristocracy’.187
The period of ascendancy of both the upper class and/or aristocracy in
each city varied, but his evidence showed that they all underwent ‘a process
of decomposition’ and were ‘ultimately swept aside’, hanging on longest to
‘what they secured last’, that is, to their cultural and charitable activities,
and all the clubs, dinners, dances, schools, and social activities associated
with them.188 In New York City he found the ‘post-Revolutionary entre-
preneurs’ leadership did not last long enough to assume an aristocratic
dimension’, and ‘by mid-century they had been replaced by nouveau riche
capitalists and ethnic political bosses, that is, by specialized functional
elites.’ Charleston’s aristocracy came to an end abruptly with the Civil War
and ‘was never to be reconstituted’. Chicago experienced more than 50 years
of upper-class leadership but Los Angeles only 30 to 40, after which in both
cities the ‘incessant surge of newcomers engulfed the older elite’, thus
‘creating a rapid circulation at the top that made three generations of upper
class families a rare event.’189 Boston’s aristocracy survived the longest until
the end of the nineteenth century, though he acknowledged that there were
similar aristocracies in other cities, most notably Philadelphia, which also
absorbed ‘newly-risen capitalists and preserved community leadership until
the end of the nineteenth century’ when the process of ‘decomposition’ and
the ‘fragmentation of sovereignty’ caught up with them.190
Charleston was a special case, but in the other four cities it was rapid eco-
nomic growth that provided opportunities for new entrepreneurs to dis-
place the old economic elite, and mass migration that encouraged the
emergence of new ethnic politicians, and these two processes that together
converted the leadership of a class into one of specialized, functional elites.
Although the newly-ascendant economic elites often sought, like their pre-
decessors, to extend horizontally into other areas of civic life and convert
themselves into an upper class, Jaher found none that had successfully
done so. Each of these upper classes, he noted, decomposed and declined
in their own time according to local economic and political circumstances,
rather than according to any national timetable or events. He found no
evidence to suggest that they were branches of, or integrated into, a national
upper class or national aristocracy. In fact, Jaher frequently described them
as ‘enclaves’ and as ‘insular’ rather than national phenomena, though most
were anxious to assert their national pre-eminence.191
After the Civil War, New York City seemed to have done so. It then
became ‘the economic capital of the country and the Manhattan business
elite … increasingly dominated economic activity’ everywhere, and ‘impinged
on the autonomy of their counterparts in other major cities.’ However,
‘even at the zenith of its commercial predominance, New York never achieved
monolithic economic rule, and the robber barons of Manhattan incessantly
squabbled among themselves.’ In any case, their economic superiority did
not ‘entail supremacy in other, admittedly less important, dimensions of
leadership, a necessary condition for the emergence of a national upper
class.’ Boston’s upper class or aristocracy which supplied a disproportionate
number of presidents, cabinet officers and well-known senators, and whose
local college had become something to a national finishing school, obtained
more national recognition, and retained national elite cultural leadership,
he thought, until Hollywood asserted its leadership of a rival sort of culture,
and other states after World War II pioneered the sunbelt lifestyle. Texas
and California, in particular, then seemed more important than New York
in national political leadership.192
Jaher concluded that the ‘contemporary power structure’ of the United
States is ‘fixed, neither geographically, culturally, nor hereditarily united’
and ‘if there is a national power elite, it has shifting geographical bases and
high turnover in personnel, and great responsiveness to political and eco-
nomic change.’ Baltzell’s detailed analyses of Philadelphia’s aristocracy was
entirely consistent with this conclusion. It left a similar impression of an

enclave, continuously drained by outward migration, confused and over-
whelmed by inward. The family name that meant so much there, the exclu-
sive clubs, the favoured schools and resorts carried little cachet in New
York City, and still less, one suspects, anywhere else.193 Blumin traced the
social networks between Philadelphia clubs, voluntary associations, the
boards of local banks, and the University of Pennsylvania, but the networks
did not extend to City Hall, or to Harrisburg, the state capital, or to Washing-
ton D.C. Its elite had decidedly less national reach than Boston’s.194 A sample
of smaller, slower growing, less economically and ethnically diverse cities
would, one imagines, also show both a slower rate of class decomposition,
and a correspondingly longer ‘generalized hegemony’. But then their aristo-
cracies would, in all probability, also have been even less able to participate
in the formation of national upper class.
There is no reason to think that the continental scale of the United States
must have been a decisive factor in preventing the formation of a national
upper class. There is considerable similarity in the political, legal, economic
and educational institutions all the way across the 50 states. Sports and other
leisure pursuits crossed the Mississippi, the Great Plains, the Rockies, even
the Pacific Ocean, and became national pastimes. In any case, the distances
are not always vast. Philadelphia is closer to New York City and to Washing-
ton than Manchester is to London. Russia has still greater distances. The
failure is therefore better attributed to economic changes that enabled new
business leaders to disrupt the ‘generalized hegemony’ that upper classes
and aristocracies had established in many cities, and to the absence of
political institutions that prevented them connecting as a national class.195
Obstacles to the formation of a ruling class
One may, however, try to identify an American upper or ruling class from
the other direction, that is to say from a national rather than a civic point
of view, and ask whether there is any evidence of its sine qua non, that is,
closely integrated political and economic elites. As some earlier remarks
have already indicated, the relationship between these two elites in the
United States is a distinctive one. Its peculiarities may be traced back to the
earliest years of the Republic, for the electorate then showed itself to be
fearful not only of state power, but also of any concentration of private
power, or of any group which they thought to be a monopoly or seeking to
become one. We have mentioned the adverse consequences of this hostility
for the organized professions, for the career civil service, for privileged cor-
porations of all kinds, for universities with colonial charters, for the Second
Bank of the United States, for the proposed University of the United States,
and indeed for any institution which had the semblance of class about
it, such as established churches and even military academies. West Point
and Annapolis were both seen as ‘nurseries of caste’ and compelled to

reform.196
The word monopoly, Letwin observed, first referred simply to ‘a special
legal privilege granted by the state’, but over time Americans came to be
equally hostile to any form of ‘exclusive control that a few persons achieved
by their own efforts’, and the word monopoly then came to apply to any
‘sort of unjustified power, especially one that raised obstacles to equality of
opportunity.’197 Thereafter, many privately-owned enterprises were deemed
to have an element of the hated monopoly. Chartered banks were treated
with enormous suspicion in the ante-bellum decades, and either strictly
regulated, limited in the number of branches they could establish, some-
times replaced by a state monopoly under the control of the state legis-
lature, or prohibited altogether.198 Electorates were no less suspicious of
railroad companies and in the 1870s and 1880s state governments began to
create utility commissions to control what were then thought to be the
natural monopolies of gas and electricity, by means of regulated franchises
to private companies. Hence, state governments, urged on by their elec-
torates, were unwilling to accept unaccountable and unlimited concen-
trations of private economic power which left alone might have become
the foundation of a ruling class.
When large inter-state railroad networks started to emerge, the limita-
tions of state regulation to control such concentrations of private power
were soon apparent, and the electorate therefore directed its concerns
about monopoly to the federal government. In the mid-1870s, Congress
was ‘snowed under’ with bills to regulate railroads, and in 1877 passed the
Act to Regulate Interstate Commerce.199 In the 1880s, when large manufac-
turing companies, like the Singer Sewing Machine Co and Standard Oil,
with the help of the railroads began to create and often to dominate national
markets, they too provoked electoral opposition. Action against these
so-called trusts became one of the central demands of minor parties, such
as the Greenbacks and United Labor Party, and the defining principle of
another, the Anti-Monopoly Party.200 The two major political parties could
hardly overlook the electoral potential of the issue, and hence there was a
queue in the 51st Congress to pass the legislation against trusts and mono-
polies in terms reminiscent of the attacks on the professions earlier in the
century. John Sherman, veteran Republican senator from Ohio, somehow
got to the head of the queue, and supported his bill by saying that
‘any combination to stifle competition, command the price of labor
and raise prices … smacked of tyranny, of kingly prerogative and a nation
that would not submit to an emperor … should not submit to an autocrat
of trade.’201 It was amended and simplified, but quickly passed by 52 votes
to 1. Trusts had few defenders. The House debated one amendment,
but passed the bill overwhelmingly, and President Harrison signed it on
July 2nd 1890.
Although it required the creation of an enforcement agency, the Federal

Trade Commission, and the more precise prohibitions of the Clayton Act of
1914, to make Sherman’s Act effective, his ringing declarations against ‘every
contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in
restraint of trade or commerce’ rapidly acquired near-constitutional status,
and signalled the determination of both the state and civil society not to
allow big businesses to collude and collaborate at will.202 The Sherman Act is
seldom mentioned in the context of class, since studies prefer to concentrate
on personal attributes, school background, club memberships, wealth, and
so forth, which are thought to distinguish the upper or ruling class. If, how-
ever, we concentrate, as Polsby suggested, on ‘issue areas’, it assumes con-
siderable importance, being one of the most important issue areas in American
history, which ended by institutionalizing a permanent tension or anta-
gonism between political and economic elites which has no counterpart in
any other industrial society. Neale compared American antitrust procedures
and their British equivalents over the two decades 1960–1980, and was struck
by the contrast between the principled, adversarial, legalistic and punitive
American approach with the modest scope, and more collaborative and con-
ciliatory procedures of the British. ‘Whereas American institutions often appear
to be designed to hamper the exercise of power’, he observed, ours (the British)
are designed on the whole to facilitate it.’203
If an upper or ruling class requires the integration of political and eco-
nomic elites, and we have agreed it does, laws requiring the former to ‘hamper’
the exercise of power by the latter can hardly help. Of course, since the
United States has had no permanent civil service at the most senior levels,
it may be that this supposed adversarial relationship is perpetually being
undermined by the American version of pantouflage, that is, the mobility of
political appointees back to the private businesses being regulated, and the
mobility of private businessmen to head regulatory agencies. Critics have
claimed that regulatory agencies have often been ‘captured’ by those they
are supposed to be regulating, and that relationship is therefore far less
adversarial than it appears, and more often covertly collusive, but evidence
that capture or collusion subsequently became a regular and permanent
feature of government-business relations is hard to come by.204 It does not
seem evident in the outcomes of regulatory decisions, since virtually all com-
parative analyses of regulation insist, like Neale, that American regulation
has been more rigorous and punitive than that of any other country.205
Many of the major American companies of their day, such as Standard Oil,
Paramount and all the major Hollywood studios, United Shoe Machinery,
General Electric, Alcoa, Xerox, IBM and Microsoft bear scars from their
encounters with the Department of Justice, some of which threatened their
continued existence. They have survived, though often in a truncated
form, or after paying hefty fines, or as in GE’s case, after a number of senior
executives served prison sentences.206
IBM may serve as an example since the inside story of its ‘big one’, that is
the antitrust suit against the company which extended from 1969 to 1982,
happens to have been told in the candid autobiography by Thomas Watson
Jr, son of the founder of the company, and his successor as chief executive
officer.207 The career of the father, Thomas Watson Sr, was from the very
beginning to the very end, dogged by antitrust investigations of the Justice
Department. His first brush with the courts occurred before World War I,
and resulted in a one-year prison sentence, subsequently suspended, and
never thereafter mentioned in the family. Tom Jr only learned about it as
an adult, after a careless remark by an IBM executive, and the disclosure
caused his father considerable distress. Tom Jr recalled that he there-
after had a more sympathetic understanding of his father’s behaviour ‘…. at
least I now knew why my father had what I’d always considered the most
irrational hatred of the Department of Justice.’208
There were several more brushes with the Department, so the company
had a rather fearful anticipation of possible government investigation long
before ‘the big one’ was actually launched in the federal courts. During
it, as it happened, the company sought to better defend itself by hiring
government lawyers, including a former Attorney-General of the United
States. Watson Jr’s memoirs enable us to see exactly what role this former
civil servant played in the attempts of IBM to escape the investigations of
the Justice Department. They do not record the phone calls to his former
subordinates in the Department, but they do show that his main contribu-
tion to company policy was to give precise, emphatic, and often unwel-
come, advice as to what IBM should do to ensure compliance with the law.
They also show the immense amount of energy, stress, anger and time that
the company spent in responding to the Justice Department’s invest-
igations and suits. Reflecting candidly on both his father’s career and his
own, Tom Jr concluded that ‘the toughest issue Dad and I ever faced was
antitrust.’
IBM may have been exceptional, though there is no reason to think that
it was, and class loyalties may have allowed other companies to take the
threat less seriously, though it seems unlikely that GE was amongst them.
We need more evidence, but in the meantime it is difficult to believe that
the adversarial relationship between political and business elites provoked
by antitrust, or by other regulatory legislation has been an elaborate pre-
tence to conceal class collaboration, or itself an expression of class interests.
Are the 600 lawyers said to be currently employed in the legal department
of Microsoft an elaborate façade to conceal its collusion with the political
elite?
For a brief period of the Great Depression, from 1933–35 during the
life of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), antitrust laws were
in abeyance, and under its auspices businessmen were able to collaborate
and collectively agree on rules to regulate markets, prices, and labour con-
ditions.209 It therefore provides a brief opportunity to observe the behav-

iour of American businessmen when they no longer had to maintain their
normal wary and adversarial stance towards the state, and could legally
‘collude’ and ‘conspire’ with each other, and with state officials, in the
French manner. As well as being a great experiment in economic policy,
the NRA was also, therefore, an accidental experiment in class formation.
If, despite Sherman, American businessmen already formed a class, the NRA
allowed them to present themselves before the American public as such,
and even to assume a legitimate place, as a class, in the American political
and economic system. If, however, they had not yet come together as a
class, then it provided them with an opportunity to do so, and to begin to
form a class. Labor unions took advantage of its pro-labor provisions in
exactly this way, and alongside Norris-LaGuardia, the NRA contributed to
the surge of working class organization and solidarity already discussed. It
should, however, have been much more favourable to the businessmen’s
class-building efforts since the chairman of the NRA, and many of his
senior appointees were outspokenly sympathetic to big business. Moreover,
the ‘code authorities’, as the governing bodies of each industry were called,
were dominated by businessmen, and the NRA itself never really accepted
organized labour’s claim that it should have equal representation on all of
them, but only on those of the few industries where organized labor had
already established its bargaining rights.210
In the event, the ‘experiment’ provides rather limited support for the
view that businessmen had already formed a class, and still less for the
idea that they began to form one under the auspices of the NRA. Some
550 codes were formulated within two years, which might itself seem
something of an achievement, and even perhaps a demonstration of class
solidarity. In 28 cases, an existing trade association itself became the code
authority, and in a further 218 an existing trade association assumed a
dominant position, though in getting on for half of these (101), arrange-
ments also had to be made for representation of non-members.211 The crit-
ical point, however, is that the code authorities seldom actually exercised
any authority. Many businessmen were unwilling to collude, or to accept
their class obligations. The best contemporary estimate was that 40% of the
code authorities had no ‘trade practice complaint plan’ whatever, meaning
that they had no enforcement procedures, while in the remaining 60%
enforcement ‘probably averages out at a very low level.’ As one observer
noted, ‘compliance was a step-child, neglected and under-nourished’, so
that ‘many of their provisions, or even in some instances whole codes’ were
‘little more than writing in the sand’ and ‘chronic violators have operated
with impunity.’ Later commentators have concentrated on the failure
of the state to make the NRA work effectively, but it was no less a failure of
the business class to behave like a class, to come together, to organize, and
to regulate themselves. One contemporary noted the ‘inability of the
members to agree on lines of action, or recalcitrancy on the part of mem-

bers of the underlying industry.’ This ‘recalcitrancy’ provoked the con-
tinuous fragmentation of code authorities, the proliferation of codes, and
innumerable jurisdictional disputes. There were, in fact, very few industries
without ‘factional interests’ and recalcitrant minorities. The code author-
ities’ task was rather easier in concentrated industries, like automobiles, but
even in them the code authority ‘seldom has the whole-hearted support of
the underlying constituency’, so ‘internecine conflict’, was ‘a common
attribute of code administration.212
Code authorities were also widely distrusted by reason of their access to
confidential information, which led some businessmen to suggest that the
federal government should be the confidential agency, but this ran head-
long into widespread and long-standing hostility of most businessmen to
any extension of the powers of the federal government.213 Organized busi-
ness were apparently not enthusiastic about collaborating either with each
other or with the Federal Government. If these be sine qua non of a ruling
class, then American business firmly declined to participate in its for-
mation.214 Two recalcitrant chicken farmers finally brought the NRA to an
end by successfully challenging the delegation of legislative powers to the
executive before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1934. The normal antagonistic
and legalistic relationship between government and business, according to
the principle enunciated by Senator Sherman, then resumed. It has con-
tinued ever since, and was subsequently reproduced in the regulation of
the environment, of consumer safety, and of employment rights of indi-
vidual employees.215 Hence, the rather curious, but indisputable fact that
the country where the legitimacy and merits of free enterprise, of private
ownership and of market competition have had most popular support now
has the most intensively regulated business corporations in the industrial
world.216
Despite this formal, public, adversarial legal relationship between America’s
economic and political elites, it is possible of course that if sufficient mem-
bers of the two elites shared a common formative, educational experience
they might still have been able to maintain, in private, some degree of
class solidarity. Did they? Did elite educational institutions in the
United States select and socialize members of the two elites like their
French counterparts?
The community studies of Middletown and Plainville inadvertently
indicated the limitations of American schools in this respect, for though
the authors of both studies claimed that the business or upper class was the
easiest class for them to identify in the two communities, neither mentioned
private schooling or elite educational institutions as criteria of admission
to it. On the contrary, the Lynds described Middletown’s high schools as
‘places where the whole range of cultural tolerances and intolerances grind
against each other’, a process that continued at the local college, the rapid
growth of which was ‘a source of immense civic pride and enthusiasm.’

West thought that for Plainville adults ‘the high school represents a new
focus of community life and ritual.’217 Business and political leaders in these
two communities could not, therefore, rely on class-segregated schooling to
inculcate distinctive styles of life, accents, manners, or leisure pursuits, or
to maintain their upper class position. Nor, obviously, to help them recog-
nize their fellow members of an upper class in other cities.
Domhoff was, however, persuaded that elite educational institutions had
contributed to the formation of an American upper class, and sought to
demonstrate it by showing that a small, though undisclosed, proportion of
wealthy American parents sent their children to expensive private schools.
They also belonged to exclusive clubs, had summer and winter residences
in exclusive resorts, often inter-married, and had ‘such prestigious occu-
pations as businessman, financier, and lawyer which’, he argued, ‘suggest
the common interest of ownership and management of business enterprise.’
Other members of this upper class, he added, ‘function as museum directors,
architects, art collectors and physicians, which are among the prestigious
pursuits on the occupational ladder.’218 Some members of this class, he
observed, have been shown by ‘acquaintanceship’ studies to know one
another. Taken together, he thought that this demonstrated the ‘cohesive-
ness and consciousness’ that makes ‘the American upper class a sociological
reality.’219
Domhoff’s evidence is less than persuasive. The elite private schools he
presumably had in mind are unknown to the vast majority of Americans,
and Kingston has shown that together they total somewhere between
0.05 and 0.17% of the American secondary schools’ enrolments, depending
on how elite schools are defined.220 This makes them all the more exclu-
sive, of course, but it also means that considerable proportions of those in
prestigious pursuits that he included in the upper class must, like the upper
classes of Middletown and Plainsville, have sent their children to public
schools. Moreover, lacking widespread public recognition, it is difficult to
see how they could influence relationships and institutions in American
society as a whole. They are too few in number to dominate enrolments
in elite universities, and have provided only a small proportion of mem-
bers of either the political or economic elite, which makes it difficult for
them to serve as nurseries of a class.
In any event, whatever may have been the case in the more distant past,
the student bodies of these elite private schools became far more hetero-
geneous in the 1960s by a process of what Baltzell called ‘aristocratic assi-
milation’. In 1960, nearly one-quarter of the student body of St. Paul’s was
‘on formal scholarship in varying amounts, while in 1962 Phillips Exeter
had 170 boys on scholarships, including 50 former newspaper boys nom-
inated by the circulation managers of major metropolitan newspapers
across the country. Overall, he argued that these and other elite schools
bear ‘dramatic witness to the staying power of the American Dream of equal-
ity of opportunity. Indeed, the familiar Left critique against these schools
is not that they are forming a ruling class, but that they were ruining the
chances of the formation of a working class by enrolling too many of its
future leaders.’221
In their study of 1,041 political appointees from the five administrations of
Roosevelt to Johnson, Stanley et al., found that 17% had attended 18 ‘name’
preparatory schools which, they thought, provides ‘impressive evidence
that federal political executives tend to be selected from a high socio-
economic group.’222 But 17% hardly seems sufficient to infer a common
class outlook, even supposing the 17% all came from privileged homes and
included none of the ex-newspaper boys or other scholarship holders.223
They went on to show that 25% of these appointees had attended Ivy League
colleges, and 40% had graduated from one of the ‘top 18’ undergraduate
universities and colleges. In 1963, Lloyd Warner and his colleagues found
that permanent, career senior civil servants, grades GS 14 and above were
also unrepresentative of the population as a whole in terms of their edu-
cational background, and then identified the 30 higher educational insti-
tutions from which a disproportionate number of them were drawn. These
were headed by George Washington University, City College of New York,
Berkeley, and Harvard, followed by six of the largest state universities.224 As
a group, these institutions do not appear to be particularly exclusive, or to
share a distinctive ethos or culture that was likely to create a class solidarity
or outlook. The only common attribute that Lloyd Warner and his col-
leagues thought relevant to mention was that these 30 institutions had
more public administration programmes than others. And critics of the
civil service of whom there have been many, seem to have a similar dif-
ficulty in recognizing its class characteristics. Numerous presidential and
congressional candidates have ‘run against Washington’, but apart from
Andrew Jackson’s original pre-emptive assault, they have usually criticized
their number, indolence or inefficiency, rather than their class characteristics.
The main issue here, however, is not whether political appointees and
senior career civil servants themselves form a class, but whether a sufficient
proportion of business leaders have shared the same selective and elitist
educational background so that we might reasonably infer that there are
bonds between these elites that might contribute to the formation of a
class. In his series of studies between 1976–2002, Dye distinguished
33 ‘prestigious’ prep schools, and found that about 6% of the 286 senior
members of executive branch of the governmental elite, and around 10%
of 3,572 business leaders had attended them.225 This hardly seems sufficient
foundation for any kind of class bond between the two elites. At college
level, however, the foundation is more substantial. Four studies of top exec-
utives in large companies between 1950–1963 found that, at most, one in
five of them had attended elite Ivy League colleges.226 According to Stanley
et al., 25% of the civil service elite went to such colleges.227 If we blithely
skate past the difficulties of comparability between the two studies, one
might express this as a 20–25 bond, but it increases substantially to 55–44
in Dye’s samples. He distinguished 12 ‘prestigious’ universities, seven of
which were Ivy League, and found that 55% of his business leaders and
43.5% of his political elite had attended them.
Hence the strongest case for their being an upper or ruling class must rest
on the fact that around half of each elite have attended one of 12 ‘prestigious’
universities. However, Dye himself was not persuaded that this was suf-
ficient to integrate the two elites into a class. He concluded that ‘govern-
mental leadership is not interlocked with the corporate world.’228 In the
French version of this same debate, we were inclined to think that the two
elites have integrated to form a class, but then the proportions sharing the
same educational background appear to be much higher than the American, a
bond, if we were to try and use the same measure, of 100–60 or higher. More-
over, this shared educational background distinguished them more decidedly
and indelibly from their peers at an early age, included attendance at
higher educational institutions which have a padagogic mission which sep-
arates them from universities, and on graduation provides exclusive access to
high status employment, lifelong rights and prospects. The 12 ‘prestigious’
American universities chosen by Dye do not appear to be distinguished
from other universities in a comparable manner in the minds of either
school teachers, ambitious parents, children, or the graduates of other uni-
versities. Are the graduates of Northwestern, which is one of them, readily
distinguishable from those of Northeastern, or graduates of Princeton from
those of Williams or Brown?
Moreover, the career paths of American elites do not appear to intertwine
quite as much as the French, and they therefore have rather less opportunity
to maintain the interconnections that generate instinctive class loyalties and
solidarity. There seems little reason to question the conclusion of Matthews
50 years ago. After reviewing all the studies of American political elites, he
decided that ‘those who make the most important political decisions in the
United States … are very far from being a cross section of the electorate’,
but they are also ‘a fairly heterogeneous lot.’229 In 1976 Dye was impressed
by the ‘multiple paths to the top’ and ‘clear evidence of specialization’
among the members of the elites he has studied over nearly 30 years, since
80% of them held only one of the top posts.230 The notable exceptions in
his view were the four families with members in many elites, the Mellons,
duPonts, Fords and above all, the Rockefellers.231 In 1996, Lerner and his
colleagues found that though most elite members are white and male, and
almost all graduated from college, they are ‘far from a tight-knit network of
upper-class dominance … only a plurality are Anglo-Saxon protestants, … a
significant proportion of their fathers were not upper-status professionals
or managers, but lower white and blue collar workers, many did not go to
America’s most prestigious schools. They are defined as members of the

elite, above all, by their occupation. Our study demonstrates how divided
American elites really are.’232
It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the repeated attempts to identify
the contribution of various schools to the socialization and formation of
elites or a ruling class is a misconceived attempt to transplant European
experience of class formation to the United States.233 No one doubts that
American colleges differ greatly in status, but the differences between them
are minutely graduated, rather than demarcating a class or classes. The only
class difference that American educational institutions seem likely to have
created is that between those who dropped out of high school and those
who graduated, or between those who attended college and those who
didn’t.234 If one is looking for the favoured gateway or socialization into
the political elite of the United States from the beginning of the Republic
to the present day, then qualifying and practicing as a lawyer would seem a
far more promising point of departure than any prep school or Ivy League
college. Twenty-five of the 52 signers of the Declaration of Independence
were lawyers, about three-quarters of the presidents of the United States,
their vice-presidents and members of their cabinets, have been lawyers,
and over the years they have been measured, around 50% of members of
both the Senate and House of Representatives, though in recent times the
proportion has fallen to a mere 40%.235
If an upper or ruling class has existed in the United States, analysis of its
formation, socialization and character might therefore sensibly focus on
prior experience as a practising lawyer, especially as a significant minority
of chief executives are themselves lawyers and lawyers are necessarily
involved at the most senior level in every large corporation, and especially,
of course, in their relationships with government.236 Moreover, American
public policy has been, and still is, distinguished by the degree to which
it is formulated by lawyers, either in the courts, the Congress or in law
schools.237
In the event, this shared experience and shared vocabulary does not
appear to have contributed to the formation of a class. Lawyers have never
displayed a particularly strong corporate esprit or regard for their corporate
status, and as we have already observed have had chronic problems in
establishing a stable form of professional government and enforcing their
professional ethics. Until World War II at least, entry to legal practice was
open to graduates of all kinds of law schools, from elite, ‘national’ schools
to commercial part-time night ones. Lawyer-legislators have been drawn
disproportionately from the latter, and were not infrequently the bitter
opponents of their fellow lawyers from the national schools who dom-
inated the bar associations as they endeavoured to raise entry standards to
the profession, and to establish effective and rigorous self-government
within it.238 Their socialization and experience as lawyers was therefore
rather varied and certainly did not prove to be a firm foundation of pro-
fessional solidarity. It seems unlikely therefore that it contributed much to
class solidarity.
Some reported sightings
So far, we have found it rather difficult to identify an upper or ruling class

in the United States, but we may complete our attempt by considering the
work of some of those who have found it easier to do so.
Useem thought he might document the networks and cohesiveness of
‘the American capitalist class’ over recent decades. In one of his most notable
studies, he collected information about 8,623 directors of the 727 largest
American corporations in 1969, and found that 1,570 of them or 18% held
two or more directorships in these firms, though they might also of course
have held directorships of other, smaller companies.239 He then found that
50% of this 18% also served as university trustees, 31% on the boards of
philanthropic foundations, 27% on health-related organizations, 25% on
charitable organizations, while 10% were trustees or members of an organ-
ization concerned with regional or community economic development.
Overall, his evidence demonstrated a rather modest degree of civic involve-
ment, which was directed more towards eleemosynary and community
activities, similar to that which Jaher had noticed in his five cities as newly-
emerging economic elites sought to extend themselves horizontally as a
class. Useem found that, in 1976, 6% of his sample served on advisory
bodies of federal government agencies, and 22% on those of state or local
government agencies, and 12% were members of one or more of 12 major
‘business policy associations’, a list which includes all those thought by
Domhoff to be ‘agents of the ruling class’.240
Useem was concerned to show that those with several directorships con-
stituted an ‘inner group’ of capitalists which was more involved in the gov-
ernance of other institutions than the rest, a point he demonstrated
without difficulty being true by definition. Boy Scouts and the Greens, one
imagines, have an ‘inner group’. He could not, however, take us much
further, and identify the policies ‘that foster the more general interests of
many, if not most, major corporations’ and could only conclude that ‘This
inner group may be an important source of political leadership capable of
promoting the more general interests of the entire capitalist class.’ The
American ‘capitalist class’ was therefore a possibility rather than a reality,
and ‘it remains’, to be shown whether these corporate directors do force-
fully represent the interests of their class … when they participate in the
governance of other institutions.’ He nevertheless, later developed his argu-
ment and claimed that there was an ‘inner circle’ of the capitalist class
in both the United States and Britain and which had inaugurated ‘a new
stage of capitalist development’, following that of ‘family capitalism’ and of
‘managerial capitalism’. He labelled this new stage ‘institutional capital-

ism’, and thought it was characterized by an ‘intercorporate management
network’ which in the 1970s and 1980s, in both countries, expressed ‘class-
wide political concerns’, ‘the filtered, refined view of large companies as a
bloc’, and the ‘integrated vision’ of the corporate community. In Britain it
was given ‘additional backbone’ by the ‘aristocracy’s extended kinship net-
works’. Filtered and integrated as it may have been, this vision nonetheless
remained extremely vague. He claimed it contributed in both countries, ‘to
the rise of more conservative political climates in the early 1980s’ and
therefore to ‘reductions in social spending’, to de-regulation and ‘to the
scaling back of programs beneficial to labor.’241
Domhoff thought he could identify the interests of the American ruling
class more precisely, and supported his evidence about their members’ social
backgrounds and networks with an analysis of numerous federal govern-
ment policies, both foreign and domestic, precisely in other words the kind
of ‘issue area’ analysis that Polsby had recommended. American foreign
policies were, Domhoff argued, formulated by ‘a power elite … rooted in
the dividends and salaries of large corporations and financial institutions’,
which served as the ‘operating arm of the upper class’ and ‘eliminated
other contenders for control of foreign policy, such as the military, the
Congress and public opinion.’ Domestic policies were, he argued, often for-
mulated by various ad hoc committees and councils, by think tanks like
Brookings, or foundations like Rockefeller and Ford, whose ‘expert staffs
were trained at universities’, which ‘members of the power elite finance
and direct.’ They provided ‘the inputs into governmental process on social
welfare matters’, enabling it ‘to deal with domestic discontent on their own
terms’, meaning they preferred regulatory agencies rather than the exten-
sion of public ownership. It is therefore not surprising, in Domhoff’s view,
‘that the outputs have maintained the wealth distribution intact, and with
the privileges, prestige and prerogatives of the few tenths of a percent of
the population making up the American upper class.’242
There is no denying many parts of this argument, that for instance,
foreign and domestic policies have been formulated by elites, that experts
on these policies are drawn from think tanks, foundations and universities
which are supported by wealthy benefactors, though his own work suggests
that it would be unwise to infer the class loyalties of these experts by refer-
ence to the donors of their home institutions. There is also no denying, of
course, that government policies have helped to preserve and promote cap-
italist institutions. How could it be otherwise? Or that inequalities of wealth
and income have increased in recent decades. Res ipsa loquitur. Domhoff
does not, however, demonstrate the relationship between the body or head
of the upper class and its ‘operating arm’, nor does he describe any actual
class mobilizations and confrontations. Instead, he imputes what he thinks
might have been, or ought to have been, the interests of the upper and
working classes in the various policy decisions he analyses rather than

showing how the representatives of each class had formulated alternative
or conflicting policies, and that those of the working class were sidelined or
overruled, as he thought was usually the case, by the experts employed by,
or dependent on, the ruling class. In short, he gives accounts of the inferred
class interests of supposed classes, and fractions of classes, rather than
account of actual class conflicts.243 He fails therefore to demonstrate the rel-
evance of class as an analytical distinction in the policy issues he examines.
In foreign policy, to take one example, he cannot show that most Americans
were more favourably disposed towards Soviet Russia than the elite who
formulated American foreign policy during the Cold War. Berger showed
that from the Spanish-American War on, the leaders of organized labour,
meaning initially the AFL, have seldom opposed American foreign policy,
and never its basic principles, and have sought to export their own brand
of unionism on the back of American political and commercial expansion.244
The re-united AFL-CIO strongly supported the post-World War II ‘cold war’
foreign policy of the United States, and were, if anything, more hardline
than successive administrations. When President Nixon launched his policy
of détente with Russia and China, the AFL-CIO denounced it as a ‘fraud’ and
the executive council voted against it 24–4, a vote that was confirmed,
without dissent, by their annual convention in 1973.245 Union leaders may
differ, of course, from their members. The growing opposition to the war in
Vietnam between 1966–1969 amongst all manual workers, and among the
population at large, was not reflected in AFL-CIO statements, but then a
two-thirds majority of all union members at that point either still sup-
ported the war or favoured a more aggressive policy.246 The best evidence of
a split between leaders and members appeared in Harris polls during 1972
and 1973 which showed that bare majorities of union members opposed
renewed bombing of North Vietnam and favoured the recognition of Cuba,
while 72% endorsed closer relations with the Soviet Union and China.
However, polls from these two years hardly seem sufficient to allow us to
conclude that grassroots union members have always or often been mis-
represented by their leaders, or that an alternative working class American
foreign policy has been consistently sidelined by that of the ruling class.247
Similarly, Domhoff provided no evidence to show that domestic policies
designed to protect business interests were unpopular with the mass of the
electorate, or that, for instance, the working class preferred the national-
ization rather than regulation of private industry.248 As we have seen, regu-
lation was first adopted with massive electoral support, and there is no
reason to suppose that the majority of the American electorate were sub-
sequently converted to the merits of public ownership.249 In 1986 the
General Social Survey identified five industries and asked a national sample
of respondents whether they favoured public ownership of each. There was
most support for public ownership of local public transport, most meaning
9%. Only 6% favoured public ownership of the electricity industry, 3% of

banking and finance, while just 2% favoured public ownership of the steel
and automobile industries.250 The absence of public ownership in the United
States can hardly therefore be attributed to the power of the ruling class.251
Other answers to the same survey, led Davis to conclude that American
attitudes towards government intervention in the economy were not laissez
faire, and it would be ‘more accurate to say they prefer regulation’.252 They
differed little, in other words, from those that prompted the 51st Congress
to vote overwhelmingly for Senator Sherman’s bill.
Fuerst analysed the failure of public housing, and in particular housing
cooperatives, in the United States, a failure that readily lends itself to a class
interpretation. But he never supposed that a ruling class had anything to
do with it. They ‘have not been able to get off the ground’, he decided,
‘because the bulk of the US population, workers and farmers, have been so
oriented to climbing the free enterprise ladder that it has precluded any
sustained interest in co-operative housing.’253 Nor was there much popular
support for other domestic policies that Domhoff favoured, and thought
the working class should favour, such as redistributive taxation to ensure
greater equality of incomes. The General Social Survey in 1986 reported that
only 17% of Americans favoured government action to ‘reduce income
differences between rich and poor’, and when asked to indicate their sup-
port for specific government policies, the most popular – that the govern-
ment ‘should provide a decent standard of living for the old’ – was
supported by only 40% of the population.254 Coleman & Rainwater sim-
ilarly found that while there was strong support for government action to
reduce inequalities of opportunity, there was virtually none for govern-
ment action to ensure equality of outcomes.255 Jackman and Jackman again
found little support for redistributive taxation, or for any form of income
equalization, and there were only slight differences across the different
classes in these respects.256
The fact that various domestic policies have ‘maintained the wealth dis-
tribution intact’ can hardly, therefore, be used to demonstrate the existence
or power of an American ruling class. There was, one might add, a sharp
contrast between American and British attitudes on all these questions. The
proposition that the government ‘should provide a decent standard of
living for the old’ was supported by 83% of British respondents versus 40%
of Americans, while 80% of British respondents said in 1988, with very
little class variation, that they wanted the government to redistribute
wealth downwards.257 Domhoff was not demonstrating the power of the
American ruling class, but merely analysing and criticizing his fellow
Americans and the American way.
Vogel carefully tracked the relationship between business and political
decision-making over the three decades 1960–1990. His first finding was
that the ‘relative political influence of business’ has varied inversely with
‘the public’s perception of the long-term strength of the American economy’,

so that over his chosen period, he could document the decline of business
influence as a result of ‘the strong performance of the American economy
from the early 1960s through to 1973’, and then its growth as the economy
faltered, so that by 1978, business was able to block the major legislative
proposals of both organized labor and the public-interest movement, and
‘began to make significant progress in achieving its own legislative goals’,
meaning the reduction of capital gains tax and corporate income tax in
1981.258
The second critical factor that Vogel thought had affected the political
influence of business over these years was the failure of firms and industries
to co-operate, an argument which reinforces our earlier observations about
the NRA experiment. ‘One reason so many industries suffered so many
political setbacks between the mid-1960s and early 1970s’ – he was refer-
ring to the extension of regulation for environmental and consumer pro-
tection, for equal employment opportunities, and occupational health and
safety – ‘is that they received no assistance from other sectors of the busi-
ness community.’ Business successes between 1978 and 1981 were, he con-
cluded, due to unified action. ‘When business is both mobilized and unified,
its political power can be formidable.’ But this ‘occurs relatively infrequently.’
Vogel concluded that ‘the class consciousness of American business, like
that of the American working class, is limited’, and he might have added,
similarly episodic.259
We began this attempt to see if there was an American upper or ruling
class with Tocqueville’s reflections in 1835 that the differences between
the American masters and workmen were probably too transitory and too
materialistic, to provide a basis for the formation of a new aristocracy.
Hemingway put much the same point succinctly to Scott Fitzgerald, who
had observed that the wealthy are different from us. ‘Yes!’ Hemingway is
said to have replied, ‘they have more money!’260 The American public has
evidently arrived at a similar conclusion. In 1947, Centers found that more
than two-thirds of Americans thought wealth and income were key factors
in determining class membership. Forty years later, Halle reflecting on
research over the intervening years, and on his own respondents at a New
Jersey oil refinery, observed that ‘sociologists who ask blue collar workers
about the meaning of class discover as I did, that almost all produce an
image based on income-level and material standard of living.’261
No one disputes that there is an elite in the United States with more
political power than everyone else, and also an elite with more money than
everyone else, and that significant minorities of both have inherited their
power and wealth. What is at issue is the readiness of these minorities to
integrate with one another as a class, and to co-opt newcomers into their
class institutions and outlook. Did the privileged upbringing, education
and experience of those who inherited their elite positions give them, as
Tocqueville put it, distinctive ‘feelings, purposes, traditions and hopes’ which
the newcomers have been persuaded to share and which distinguish them
from other Americans? The institutions, interests, issues, actions and
boundaries that might define a class formation of this kind have proved
difficult to identify.
7
Interim Conclusions from Three
Societies
The preceding evidence of classes in these three societies falls a long way
short of being exhaustive; indeed it should be considered a first trawl, illus-
trative and indicative rather than conclusive. Many sources have been over-
looked, some for reasons of space, many more no doubt through ignorance. A
number of the conclusions therefore remain open to debate, but even if we
suppose that some of the final verdicts were reversed – that for instance the
post-emancipation Russian dvorianstsvo was not quite as ‘decomposed’ as
we suggested it was, and those of them making careers in the bureaucracy
had not merged with the chinovniki as much as we thought, or that the
French grands corps were not quite the ruling class we decided they were, or
that American business leaders had more class solidarity than we detected –
the evidence we have reviewed has nonetheless provided numerous exam-
ples of the way political decisions and events have affected the emergence,
or non-emergence, of classes in these societies. Since this evidence is not
particularly arcane, indeed little more than standard fare for anyone whose
interest in class extends beyond their own country, and since the inter-
pretation of it has not required any special ingenuity or manipulation, it
seems reasonable to draw some tentative conclusions from it, especially
when it points consistently in the same direction.
First of all, it suggests that these three societies have not had the same
complement of classes: late Imperial Russia had five, at varying stages of
formation, Soviet Russia had just one, while France had five, but they only
partially corresponded with the five of Imperial Russia. The United States
seem to have had difficulty establishing any enduring, national class for-
mations at all. Its classes seem to have been only episodic and half-formed,
such as the ‘civic’ upper classes in a number of nineteenth-century cities,
the short-lived pre-Civil war middle class observed by just one scholar, and
intermittent and relatively brief surges of working class solidarity and sen-
timent. Furthermore, classes in these three societies do not appear to have
moved along the same tracks, or to have been propelled by the same forces,
at the same speed, over the same lifespan, nor to have included similar
207
proportions of the entire population of the three countries. The assump-

tions that sociologists sometimes make when they try to generalize about
classes or compare them, such as supposing that one society, allegedly the
most advanced, might represent others, or plucking evidence from several
to provide a composite picture of all, or assuming that they all have the same
number, distinguished by the same characteristics, and everyone must belong
to one or other, are difficult to square with this evidence.
Second, it has been shown that the crucial events in the formation and
dynamics of many of these classes long preceded the emergence and develop-
ment of industrial capitalism, so classes can hardly be a product of it. More-
over, the striking resemblances between the two Russias suggest that the
presence and absence of private ownership of the means of production is
unlikely to have been a significant determinant of their class formations.
And the marked differences between capitalist France and the United States
only reinforce these doubts. Obviously, one would like to test this conclu-
sion by pitting this evidence of class formation against an explanation
which gave primacy to one or other material factors, and seeing which
could provide more insight into the way classes were formed, or obstructed,
in these societies, and the peculiarities of their careers. No one has,
however, ever tried to do this.1 It is a moot point whether it could be done.
Many observers seem to have decided, after giving primacy to material
factors, that it need not be done, and that the class systems of capitalist
societies must, in essentials, be the same. Alas! As the number of social sci-
entists who are interested in classes is declining fast, we will probably never
witness such a confrontation or be able to decide on the respective merits
of the two approaches.2
The third main conclusion is that revolutionary events seem to be of par-
ticular importance in defining and understanding the crucial relationship
between the state and civil society, and therefore in understanding class
relations. Their metaphorical namesakes, industrial revolutions, no doubt
determined the size of various classes, but real revolutions determine their
structure, goals and relationships. This is not, as one might first suppose,
because revolutions fundamentally transformed the relationship between
the state and civil society, since we have found significant continuities in
this respect through all three revolutions. It is rather because the revolution-
ary restatement or redefinition of this relationship provided a memorable and
authoritative enunciation of its proper form, and this remained a superior
source of legitimacy for later generations, a mountain peak of legitimacy
one might say, which decisively influenced the way both states and organ-
ized interests in civil society subsequently behaved towards one another.
Many of the later political decisions mentioned in the course of the three
investigations therefore have an intelligible connection back to revolution-
ary events. Revolutionary politics evidently set agendas and parameters for
normal politics.
Interim Conclusions from Three Societies 209
A fourth conclusion, towards which some, though not all, of the evidence
points is that classes seem to have been formed most effectively when there
was some form of continuous relationship or collaboration between the
state and civil society. Imperial Russia provided several examples of the
state acting alone to create classes, but all the classes its rulers invented and
authorized, its nobility, bourgeoisie and peasantry, remained purely nominal,
inert categories and gave few, if any indications of collective loyalties or
collective life. We therefore declined to recognize them as classes at all. It
also appeared to provide two examples – the intelligentsia and the emergent
working class – of civil society acting spontaneously and alone, but then we
could not avoid noticing how the state had contributed, often unwittingly,
to the formation of both, so they can hardly be said to have emerged solely
from within civil society. There remained the servitor nobility class, the
merger of dvorianstvo and chinovniki, and its successor the Soviet nomen-
klatura, both of which were certainly creations of the state, and civil society
only ‘collaborated’ passively in their formation by accepting that they
shaped ‘the basic normative framework for individual and social relation-
ships’ and were one of the fundamental ‘categories in which the world
worked.’
The relationship between the state and civil society also seems to have
been critical in the formation of all five French classes though the nature of
that relationship differed in each case. Initially, the ‘revolutionary pro-
letariat’ could only define itself by its adversarial relationship with the
French state since it appeared several generations before there was any
capitalist bourgeoisie, owning large-scale manufacturing plants, for it
to oppose or overthrow. However, it maintained this adversarial stance
even after the state became a representative democracy, and even though it
depended on state support. Its relationship with the state, one might say,
then became ambivalent, both adversarial and collaborative. While it still
attempted to unnerve state officials whenever it could, it simultaneously
recognized that it needed state intervention and support whenever it
hoped to obtain a satisfactory response, or indeed any response, from
employers.
France’s intellectuals organized as class largely though not exclusively
within state institutions, and in response to government policies which
they hoped to change. The relationship with the state was similarly critical
to the formation of classes of cadres and self-employed small businessmen,
though in the former case the relationship was collaborative like that of their
superiors, the corpsards, while that of the latter was violently adversarial and
therefore resembled that of the working class. The emergence of a ruling class,
or something close to it, under the Fifth Republic was only possible because
higher civil servants were able to take advantage of their state credentials,
state careers and of the long-standing relationship between the state and pri-
vate business. It would, we may safely conclude, be impossible to understand
the formation and behaviour of any of these French classes without refer-
ence to state institutions and decisions.
The United States provided few examples of fully-formed enduring classes
precisely because state and federal governments have generally been reluc-
tant to grant selective rights, create privileges and exclusive corporate insti-
tutions around which interests in civil society might organize classes. Hence
interests in American civil society have for the most part been left to organ-
ize and mobilize classes by themselves, and seem to have found it difficult
to do so. The apparent exception was the surge of working class organ-
ization and solidarity over the years 1932–1947, but then it is not an excep-
tion, since it only happened because both the President and the Congress
were willing to collaborate with, and support organized labour over these
years. When that support was withdrawn, class solidarity and organization,
and the promise of an enduring American working class, also began to
dissolve.
A fifth, more contentious, conclusion follows silently on the heels of the
fourth, as soon as we seek to explain why class formation should benefit
from the collaboration of the state and civil society. The most likely reason,
or so this evidence suggests, is that either on their own is incapable of
converting social inequalities into classes. If they do not collaborate,
and one of them remains indifferent or hostile, it follows that the other
single-handedly wishing to create a class will find itself opposed both by
the indifferent or hostile other party, as well as by indifferent or hostile
market forces. Such a contest, it would seem, is rarely an even one, and
classes therefore find it difficult to form, or achieve any degree of solidarity
or public recognition. Classes appear, in other words, to require the collab-
oration of the state and civil society against the market.
The idea that market forces are indifferent to the formation of classes,
and that the state and civil society must collaborate to successfully organize
classes against them, might seem to fly in the face of much sociological
wisdom which presents the market as the ultimate point of origin of classes.
However, our evidence pretty consistently suggested that, left to them-
selves, market forces undermine and dissolve class distinctions and class
organizations. They blurred all the legally-defined classes of Imperial Russia,
and the possibility that they might undermine the official classes of Soviet
Russia prompted its rulers to administer stratification in meticulous detail.
Soviet rulers, one may safely say, would have accepted the proposition that
market forces dissolve classes without the least demur. Post-Soviet Russia
provides further evidence of the class-dissolving role of markets since the
nomenklatura has been better able to maintain its position in political, than
in economic life. In examining French classes, we had less opportunity to
refer to the failure or dissolution of classes, though the very fact that all five
of the classes we were able to identify were defined by their relationships
with the state rather than by their market situations is consistent with the
Interim Conclusions from Three Societies 211
argument. Moreover, the non-appearance of an organized middle class is

plausibly attributable to the fact that there were few self-governing profes-
sions that might have been supported by, or might have collaborated with,
the state to organize it. The fact that the subsidiaries of foreign multi-
nationals do not make use of the elevated walkway between political and
economic power on which its ruling class depends suggests that market
forces are already having some destabilizing effect. If the French state were
to one day allow foreign take-overs of its large companies, we might then
witness the class-dissolving power of the market.
In the United States virtually all the potential agents of class formation
were forced by state action to accept market competition which meant
their potential remained permanently unrealized. There were numerous
examples. The promiscuous chartering of universities, for instance, created
a differentiated market among higher educational institutions, which
helped to blur their capacity to create or reinforce class distinctions. State
governments forced all professionals into the market place, and therefore
long made it difficult for them to distinguish themselves collectively from
tradesmen, and to organize and cohere as members of a class. Market forces
also undermined the ‘civic’ upper classes and aristocracies, and prevented
them coalescing as a national upper class. Antitrust laws made collabora-
tion between business leaders, and collaboration with the political elite,
more difficult, and therefore obstructed the formation of either a capitalist
or ruling class. By encouraging mass immigration the Federal Government
also helped to make a free labour market, and once the protection it had
given to labour unions came to an end with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947,
labour unions were forced to compete continuously with one another, as
well as with employers, for support. Again and again, therefore, the American
state declined to collaborate with organized interests in civil society, and
insisted they compete with one another in the marketplace, and this
seemed a far more important factor in explaining the fragility of class insti-
tutions there than any of the supposed ‘exceptional’ factors in American
history. It cannot be mere coincidence that of the three societies we have
considered, the United States is the one where market forces have been
given freest rein and is also the one where durable classes are most difficult
to identify.
Looking back over the evidence we have considered, it would be reason-
able to deduce that ceteris paribus a classless society would be more likely to
appear where the state only intervened to maintain perpetual and universal
market competition, rather than where it benevolently sought to redress
or eliminate class distinctions. Inequalities might then be immense, but
classes, our evidence suggests, would have difficulty institutionalizing and
organizing themselves.
This view of market forces as a solvent of classes is not quite as radical
and total a break with sociological commentary as at first it sounds, for
some class analysts have come close to acknowledging this selfsame point.
Sorensen, for instance, sought to provide a parsimonious and precise expla-
nation of class conflict by arguing that it derives from rent-seeking behav-
iour, the privileged seeking to protect existing rents from which they
benefit, while those who suffer from them, and are thereby exploited, seek
to eliminate them. He concluded that competition eliminates rents, and so,
as he put it, ‘a rent free labor market will be one where simple class schemes
are increasingly less applicable.’3 Three of the examples he gave of success-
ful rent-seeking behaviour – trade unions, professional associations and
schools which grant credentials – presupposed some capacity to act collec-
tively to obtain state recognition and protection, so his argument is not far
from what is being proposed here.4 Or consider those who have investi-
gated the rise of ‘consumerism’, such as Doyle’s analysis of cocoa advertise-
ments in Britain. He sought to show that worker identities, linked with
trade and class, were ‘co-opted to create and eventually homogenize a new
consumer mass identity in which individual aspirations replaced political
and group aims’, which is tantamount to saying that free markets blur, or
even dissolve, classes.5 Two of the most influential commentators on the
English working class in the mid-twentieth century, Hoggart and Williams,
continually bemoaned the commercialism that was undermining its solid-
arity and collectivism.6 Many other observers come close to making the
same point.7
The aim here, however, is not to write yet another commentary on class
analysis, but simply to discover clues from the comparison of three other
societies which may help to solve the mystery of the class-ridden English,
with which we began. Two clues seem particularly important: first, that we
should pay special attention to revolutionary conflicts, since they are likely
to illuminate the all-important relationship between the state and civil
society, and second, that we should study collective action prior to indus-
trialization, if we wish to understand the formation of classes during and
after it.
8
Re-examining the English Mystery
The aristocracy first defined the relationship between the state and civil society
in England, and it remained a clearly-defined universally-acknowledged ruling
class for the best part of a millennium during which it shaped numerous
English institutions. Even today recollection of its former role lingers as a
distinctive and visible symbol of the English class ‘system’. It must there-
fore be considered first, and any theory of classes in England, we may safely
say, that does not incorporate this most ancient and durable of classes isn’t
worth a candle.
The aristocracy as prototype
The relationship between the state, in the person of the monarch, and
English civil society was originally defined by the peculiar predilection of
Norman and Plantagenet kings for exercising public power through private
individuals in civil society, rather than by constructing a central apparatus
by which they might directly control their subjects, as their cousins, the
kings of France were doing. By deciding to act in this manner, they encour-
aged, as White put it, ‘self-government at the king’s command.’1 Although
the summonses, juries, inquests, and various kinds of ‘assemblings’ convened
for purposes of public administration, involved a degree of wider, and even
popular, participation, they meant in practice that the early English state
became peculiarly dependent upon the landed aristocracy and gentry, rather
than on its own officials.2 Referring to the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, Briddick observed that the ‘early modern English state depended on
participation’, and noted ‘a certain lack of clarity in the differences between
public and private activities’, so when ‘there was a material interest or moral
consensus among local and national elites it was effective, where there was
no such consensus it was not.’3 In the present context, it is aristocratic par-
ticipation in public, governmental functions, either locally and directly or
through Parliament that matters, for it enabled the English aristocracy and
gentry to legitimize and retain their powers and privileges, long after the
213
aristocracies of continental Europe had been displaced, and rendered ‘func-

tionless’ by centralized state administrations.
The nature of the relationship between the king and the aristocracy, the
degree of aristocratic participation in government, was not of course, imme-
diately settled and defined by Norman and Plantagenet kings. The balance
of rights and obligations between them remained a matter of continuous,
and frequently violent, dispute, over centuries. Bush referred to an aristo-
cratic ‘tradition of revolt’, from Magna Carta in 1216, and the Charter of
the Forest in 1217, the Provisions of Oxford in 1258, and the ordinances
impressed on Edward II in 1311.4 From this date until the Tudor accession
in 1485, five kings were deposed by aristocratic opponents, and in the
25 years between 1460 and 1485, the Crown forcibly changed hands six
times. Although these disputes usually involved personal and dynastic
ambitions, aristocratic opponents of the king saw themselves, and pre-
sented themselves to their peers, as defenders of the aristocracy’s customary
rights against royal absolutism. Specifically, they attempted to force the king
to dismiss various ‘evil counsellors’, whom they usually portrayed as ‘upstart
favourites or bureaucrats of foreign, clerical or commoner origin’, and they
demanded that he consult his leading nobles more frequently on govern-
ment policy, and especially on matters of law and taxation.5
The Tudor monarchs who ruled from 1485–1603 somehow had the happy
knack of pacifying the aristocracy, and of ‘attaching them to the royal
interest’, so they were seldom threatened either by aristocratic revolts or by
parliamentary protests. The Stuarts who succeeded them were less fortunate
or less adroit, and provoked two major conflicts which came to involve not
only the aristocracy, but most, if not all, of the English people: the Puritan
Revolution 1642–1649 and the Glorious Revolution 1688–1689, which may
reasonably be seen as two stages of one revolution. Together, they defined
the way the relationship between state and civil society was to continue in
England, and later in Britain, from the end of the seventeenth century to
the end of the twentieth. In one fundamental respect, therefore, England
was no different from our other three societies: the subsequent scope of
state action, and the nature of its relationship with civil society, was defined
by revolutionary events.
Charles I prepared the way for the Puritan Revolution by his 11 years of
‘thorough’ government from 1628 to 1639, when he governed without a
Parliament, apparently in the hope that he could rule as an absolute mon-
arch and radically redefine his relationship with the aristocracy and the rest
of civil society. That possibility was removed by rebellion in Scotland, fol-
lowed by the invasion of England, and the occupation of Newcastle by a
Scottish army. This compelled him to recall Parliament, that is, to assemble
the representatives of the aristocracy and gentry as a corporate body, along
with propertied commoners, so that he might obtain funds to raise an
army to repel the Scots. Since he would not abandon his claim to absolute
Re-examining the English Mystery 215
power, this decision eventually led, by events that we need not recount, to
civil war and to his execution in 1649. This, however, and a decade and
more of republican government, did not finally settle the relationship
between the state and civil society.
Having been restored to the throne in 1660, Charles II ruled for two
decades before renewing his father’s effort to establish an absolute mon-
archy in the early 1680s in the last years of his reign. His aim was to bring
Parliament, the courts and their inns, all the chartered boroughs, along
with their companies and guilds, as well as the universities, under royal
control. He did this, in the main, by the peaceful, and entirely legal,
process of serving writs of quo warranto on most of the significant char-
tered bodies in the kingdom, boroughs, guilds and companies, which
required them to show by what right they exercised their powers of self-
government. Given the changes of regime over previous decades, there
were few charters that could survive scrutiny by a reasonably assiduous law
officer of the Crown. Some chartered bodies contested the royal writs in the
courts, but most surrendered their charters, hoping that they might be reis-
sued on rather more favourable terms than if they continued to resist.
In the event, the new charters invariably required royal approval of all
their governing officers. Parliament, of course, had no charter, but many
members of the Commons were returned by chartered boroughs, and writs
of quo warranto served on them were therefore an indirect means of obtain-
ing control over Parliament. When Charles II died in 1685, his quo warranto
strategy was continued, and even accelerated, by his brother, James II.
Again, other events, that we need not recount, intervened, such as the trial
of seven bishops, the appointment of many Catholic officers in the army,
and the unexpected birth of a son to James’ wife, raising the spectre of a
Catholic heir to the throne. These, along with the attacks on chartered
bodies, provoked the second and concluding stage of the revolution, the
so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, which ended with the flight of
James II, and the accession to the throne of his younger daughter Mary,
and her husband, William, Prince of Orange.6
Many observers wonder whether the events of 1688–1689 should be
described as a revolution at all, since they were entirely peaceful, and were
not inspired by any passion for radical political or social change.7 They had
no celebrated leaders, and no John Hancock. The seven signatories of the
critical invitation to William of Orange to ‘invade’ England and take the
throne, wrote their names in cipher, and though subsequently referred to
as the ‘immortal seven’, there is not an English person in a hundred could
name even one of them.8 Moreover, the members of the Convention that
followed William’s arrival did their utmost to disguise from themselves, as
much as anyone else, that they had done anything the least unconsti-
tutional or revolutionary.9 It was, one might say, a revolution that dared
not speak its name. Like the Puritan Revolution before it, however, it was a
successful struggle to resist royal attempts to establish a new relationship

between king and Parliament, and between the state and civil society. Both
were fought in the name of established rights, to preserve the ‘ancient lib-
erties and franchises’ of the English people, and not, like the French and
the American revolutions, in the name of some newly-discovered and pro-
claimed natural rights.
In the event, the Glorious Revolution did rather more that preserve
an existing relationship, since it made Parliament, previously considered
an ancillary, secondary, and even optional, part of government and law-
making, into a primary and permanent part, and thereby marked the
beginning of representative government under an unwritten constitution
which continues to this day. It also ensured that the wealth, power, status
and functions of the aristocracy were never seriously threatened for the
next two centuries, during which Britain industrialized, saw the emergence
of new cities and new classes, moved slowly towards representative demo-
cracy, and created a centralized administrative state apparatus. Aristocratic
political power appears to have been threatened less by the extension of
the franchise to the middle classes, than by the growth at the end of the
nineteenth century of political parties – a mechanism which, as Arendt
observed, enabled the masses to choose their own leaders. Thereafter aristo-
cratic representation in the House of Commons, and therefore in cabinets,
slowly declined.10 Many of their local governmental functions were removed
by the reform of local government in 1888. The introduction of death duties
in the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 meant that they could no longer pass on to
their property intact to their eldest sons, and therefore undermined the
secure economic foundations on which the class had long relied. Cannadine
who exhaustively traced their decline, identified three factors of ‘the great-
est importance’: the impact in England of ‘the virtual disappearance of the
Irish grandees and gentry as the territorial, governing and social elite’ of that
country; the First World War ‘during which a greater proportion of the
aristocracy suffered violent deaths than in any conflict since the Wars of the
Roses’; and third ‘the sales of land between 1910 and 1922 which amounted
to a transfer of property on a scale rivalled in Britain this millennium only by
the Norman Conquest and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.’11
The decline of the English aristocracy was, however, uniquely tranquil
and uniquely prolonged.12 They were never toppled, or overthrown, never
violently attacked, indeed never discredited, since the contributions of
some of their members to many British institutions, including the factory
acts and social reform, were widely recognized and respected. Those who
might have been expected, in the view of critical observers, to have sought
to overthrow the aristocracy, the representatives and spokesmen of manu-
facturers, and those of the organized working class, declined to do so.
Rather than abusing the aristocracy and all their works, and sweeping it
aside, they both came over subsequent generations to join it, and became
in name at least members of the aristocracy, thereby helping to preserve

some aristocratic institutions and values.
The English aristocracy had always been open to new recruits, first to
those who earned the gratitude or enjoyed the favour of the sovereign, and
later that of prime ministers. Prime ministerial patronage was used by
Lloyd George in a rather squalid manner to reward those who contributed
to party funds. Later prime ministers appear, however, to have used their
patronage more honourably, and somewhat more transparently, to recog-
nize and reward those they deemed meritorious, in one way or another, in
various walks of life. Suspicions arose in March 2006 about Mr Blair’s nom-
inations of four Labour peers, but the subsequent police investigation
showed they were groundless, or at least provided no grounds for a prose-
cution. Since 1964 most new peers have been non-hereditary ‘life peers’,
and the aristocracy has therefore become still more open, which no doubt
helps to explain why its titles, its manners, its institutions, in particular the
House of Lords, as well as hereditary peers, have been able to survive in an
increasingly democratic society.
In a comparative context, the endurance of the English aristocracy is
remarkable, but it may be that the manner of its passing is still more
remarkable. Push never came to shove. Having been progressively edged
out of the House of Commons, the powers of the House of Lords were cur-
tailed in the early twentieth century, and a half-century or so later the
hereditaries began to be counter-balanced by life-peers and only at the turn
of the twenty-first century were most of them, though not all, excluded
from the House of Lords, and from any role in the legislative process.13
Such a lack of urgency must say something about the English and their
classes. Perhaps it is a testament to the legitimacy that the aristocracy had
established over previous centuries, but it more certainly suggests that there
was no new class bursting at the doors, hoping to replace them.
The elites who succeeded them
For most of English history, the ruling class is therefore relatively easy to
define since it was virtually co-extensive with the aristocracy, and the mon-
arch’s ennoblements conveniently announced the new entrants, though
we might wish to supplement them with a few of the wealthier, untitled,
gentry. Wealth, status and power, in other words, closely coincided with
one another, and were concentrated in this one class. Since the nobility
dominated both political and economic life, as well as the military, with
the marginal exception of the Royal Navy, there were no rival elites. Public
administration, such as it was, was also in aristocratic hands, since lesser
officials were often their nominees, until 1870. The law long remained a
rather aristocratic profession, and aristocrats were usually patrons of many
voluntary activities. Younger sons of the aristocracy dominated the colonial
service, the Church, and also played a part in the emergence of the new
industrial economy.14 Every elite therefore recruited from people of the
same background, and kin ties linked one with another. Aristocratic values
were able to shape a host of British institutions, even their pressure groups,
their sports and their leisure pursuits. The Marquis of Queensberry was not
himself a boxer.
However, as Britain became an industrial and democratic society, the ruling
class became progressively rather more difficult to define. New elites emerged
that did not draw their members exclusively from the aristocracy, and it
was possible to obtain wealth, power and status, or any one of these things,
without being a landholding aristocrat. Once that process got under way,
and we might date it roughly from the Great Reform Act of 1832, the ruling
class became steadily more differentiated, and increasingly difficult to recog-
nize and define. Power, status and wealth no longer coincided, since mem-
bers of these elites might be distinguished by one of these attributes but
lack another, and kin ties no longer linked one elite with another.
If we try to define a ruling class over the half century since World War II,
when this process of the fragmentation of the ruling class was quite far
advanced we would probably wish to include the shrinking remnant of
those who inherited everything, position, title and wealth, including H.M.
the Queen and the royal family. Alongside them, or perhaps below, we might
then place the wealthier and more powerful life peers who have been awarded
their titles, as well as serving ministers, and the heads of largest financial
and manufacturing enterprises. We would probably also include senior civil
servants and military officers, and also the leaders of major trade unions
since they exercised considerable power over some of these decades. We
might also find room perhaps, by reason of their ‘intellectual capital’, for
the leaders of major professional bodies, and also for the Archbishop of
Canterbury, other bishops of the Church of England, leaders of other reli-
gious denominations, by reason, one might say, of their ‘spiritual capital’.
This list roughly corresponds with Guttsman’s analysis of all the power
elites of Britain in 1963, which was probably the most comprehensive
analysis ever conducted.15
At first sight this appears to be a rather varied collection of elites, who
have risen to their positions of leadership in their respective worlds by
diverse routes, some by heredity, some by winning the support of a local
constituency political party and demonstrating their ability over a number
of years in the House of Commons, and more recently, in the media, some
by excelling in their undergraduate and civil service entry examinations
and then by demonstrating their ‘soundness’ to superiors and colleagues.
Financial leaders, in the past at least, seem to have benefited more than
others by their elite public school or military backgrounds, while leaders of
private manufacturing businesses, we know, came to the top in a great variety
of ways, by inheritance, by entrepreneurial success, or by promotion through
the ranks of salaried management and often, as we have seen, from the shop-
floor. Professional and religious leaders presumably owed their advancement
to the respect they earned from their colleagues in their own worlds.
The question we have to consider therefore is whether these elites have
been integrated as a class, either because their talents were polyvalent in the
manner of the nomenklatura or the grands corps enabling them to have inter-
secting career pathways, or because they had some fundamental common
class socialization and have some common class interest. Were there, or are
there, functional equivalents of the institutions that socialized and inte-
grated elites in Soviet Russia and France? There are three plausible poss-
ibilities: first, the public school education many of them experienced,
second their wealth and the lifestyle it made possible, and the third is that
one of the surviving integrative institutions of the aristocracy, the House of
Lords, has continued to perform the same function for these new elites.
The third seems the least likely possibility for though members of these
elites certainly enter the Lords, they tend to do so in their twilight years,
usually after they have left the positions of power whose integration is here
at issue, so its functions in this respect, one guesses, are minor. In any case,
no one happens to have argued, or documented, the contribution of the
House of Lords to the integration of contemporary elites.16 We will there-
fore leave it on one side, and concentrate on the first two.
Tawney was the first to try to measure the contribution that public
schools made to the formation of the British ruling class. In 1927, he found
that 75% of a sample of 1,218 of what he called ‘leaders of British society’,
which included the Church, the law, civil service, directors of banks and
railway companies, though not directors of manufacturing companies, had
been educated at public boarding schools.17 Repeating the same exercise in
1939, the Fleming Committee found that the proportion was still 76%.18 In
1963, Guttsman was also impressed by the proportion of 12 samples of
‘contemporary elite groups’ who had received their schooling ‘either in
public boarding schools or in independent day schools’ in the decade fol-
lowing World War II.19 In 1981 Fidler brought together nine earlier studies
of the business elite between 1938 and 1975, and found that the propor-
tions who had been educated at public schools varied between 52% and
71%.20 In his own sample of 130 leading businessmen in 1979, 59% had
attended public schools. In 1993, however, Hannah became the first analyst
able to record, and celebrate, a decline. He found that ‘only’ 42% of the
current chairmen of the top 50 British companies had attended public
schools.21
These are substantial proportions of these elites, and the key question is
whether the public, and independent schools more generally, instilled a
class solidarity which could last throughout their pupils’ lives. Many of them
were boarding schools, and therefore what sociologists call total insti-
tutions, for most of the year at least, and since they were often isolated
geographically, and under strict rules about the kind of contacts they could
have with the surrounding community, it is not unreasonable to suppose
that the socialization that adolescents received at them had a life-shaping
influence on their choice of career, their political views, their friendships,
reading habits, their sporting and leisure pursuits, their dress, their speech,
and way of life. Countless novels, autobiographies and biographies and
films bear testimony to their indelible influence, none perhaps more mov-
ingly than the film Another Country, the story of the traitor and defector to
the Soviet Union, Guy Burgess, who, even after years in his adopted home-
land, could never quite give up the habits he had acquired at Eton. Class
solidarity was apparently not one of them.
One of the reasons for hesitating to accept public schools as socializing
agents is that they are themselves rather heterogeneous and difficult to
define. Sometimes, they include only boarding schools, sometimes only the
Clarendon Nine, two of which were not predominantly boarding schools,
sometimes the 200 odd members of the Headmasters’ Conference, and
sometimes they also include direct grant schools which received public
funds on condition that 25% of their places were reserved for holders of
local authority scholarships.22 Sometimes they are even taken to include, as
Guttsman did, all independent schools, that is the entire ‘non-maintained
sector’, meaning all schools not controlled or funded by the state, even
though these schools, as McKibbin observed, have ‘differed enormously in
success, prestige, provision and independence.’23
However, if we ignore these differences and treat them as a bloc, it is
clear that these schools differ in important respects from French grandes
écoles and the Soviet communist party as a means of class formation. They
did not select entrants on the threshold of the ruling class by criteria
deemed relevant by its existing members, and do not appear to have pro-
vided them with relevant vocational training, or guaranteed them access to
the ruling class, let alone lifetime membership of it.24 They selected their
entrants by a rudimentary ‘common entrance’ examination administered
at an early age, and thereafter did not continuously screen their pupils for
diligence and academic ability. They seem to have been more concerned to
provide them with the manners of gentlemen rather than skills specific to
their future tasks as members of the ruling class, unless mandatory team
sports be counted as such. It does not seem likely, therefore, that they
could have served quite as well as socializing agents of the ruling class as
the special party schools for members of the Soviet nomenklatura or the
French grandes écoles.
Mack, the great historian of these schools, must be counted among the
sceptics of their class-forming potential. He cautioned against exaggerating
their impact, and wondered whether the ‘traits of the upper classes’ that
they were frequently thought to have produced might not have been ‘either
inherited, produced at home or acquired in later life.’25 Wilkinson, by con-
trast, thought they were extremely effective socializing agencies, and sub-
titled his perceptive analysis of public school life, ‘a comparative study of
the making of rulers’. However, most of his examples of the public schools’
contribution to ruling as such, were drawn from the colonial service. None
refer to their old boys ruling in industry and trade, a rather serious lacuna if
they were also to rule at home.26 His references to their intended and real
contribution to British life refer to their encouragement of an ethic of public
service, and to the ideal of a gentleman, which were surely not exclusive to
the ruling class, and were just as appropriate for those entering the profes-
sions, which appear in fact to have been the most common destination for
their pupils, though there is no evidence to prove the point. While Guttsman
was persuaded, in 1969, that there was a ruling class, he continuously referred
to the public schools as recruited from, and for, the middle class, not from
and for an upper or ruling class. Orwell was an old Etonian and while he
was also convinced there was a ruling class, insisted that he himself was
middle class, or as he once put it when trying to give his precise class loca-
tion, a member ‘of the lower upper-middle class.’27 Perhaps, therefore, we
might be more accurately say that the public schools provided a peculiarly
advantageous starting-point for entry to the ruling class, rather than an
entry credential, or initial socialization for it.
The advantages of this starting point appear to have been greatest when
the vast majority of school leavers had no secondary school credentials at
all, and to have steadily declined as secondary and university education
expanded. A 1972 analysis of a national sample of the adult population,
the majority of whom must have left school prior to World War II found
‘that school type made a substantial difference to occupational attainment
even after controlling for qualifications’. However, when Heath and Cheung
conducted a similar analysis of the 17,000 or so children born in the week
March 3rd–8th 1958, who left school in mid to late 1970s, they found that
school attended had no measurable impact on an individual’s occupation.
They observed that the ‘notion that the old school tie brings major benefits
is one of Britain’s favourite myths about itself, but we have failed to detect
any evidence that the old school tie brought positive advantages to the
NCDS cohort’ that is up to the time of their analysis in 1996.28 It would
therefore seem that the public schools’ greatest contribution to the inte-
gration of elites, and to the formation of an upper class, was made over the
several generations between the decline of the aristocracy, and the rise of
mass secondary and tertiary education, and more specifically from the late
nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth.
The second possibility, that these elites are integrated as a class by their
wealth alone, seems most plausible if one accepts that financial capital is
the sole or primary source of political and social power, an assumption that
we had reason to question when considering both the nomenklatura and
the grand corps. Those who have been persuaded that wealth alone could
create a ruling class used to argue that the financial elite of the City of
London was the successor of the land-holding aristocracy and had formed a
new English and British ruling class, or at least its core.29 Many sons of the
aristocracy found acceptable employment in the City, and it also seems to
have been well co-ordinated with some of the other elites. It has therefore
usually figured at the centre of sociological analyses of the ruling class. In
1959, Lupton and Wilson reported that a high proportion of 422 leading
figures in the City had attended elite public schools, that their kin ties
included senior politicians and civil servants, that a considerable propor-
tion of them had served in the military, usually in elite army regiments,
and that, if they attended a university at all, it was almost always either
Oxford or Cambridge. A sizeable minority also belonged to London clubs,
where they could meet, and maintain their links with the administrative
and political elites, or with one political party at least.30 Sampson’s impres-
sionistic account corroborated the importance of family and school in the
City’s elite, and noted that a significant proportion were either old or new
aristocrats. Whitley’s more systematic analysis of City institutions found
that little had changed by 1973.31
When, however, it is compared with the Soviet nomenklatura or range of
powers and positions at the disposal of, or accessible to, French corpsards,
the claims that the City of London’s elite were the successors of the aristoc-
racy, and the core of the twentieth century ruling class, seem less than per-
suasive. Both the Russian and French, after all, occupied and used the
apparatus of the state as their own collective resource, and the range and
penetration of their powers over the rest of society seems far greater than
that of the British financial elite, even when we look back to its heyday prior
to World War I. To begin with, the British financial elite was always sharply
divided, culturally and personally, from the leaders of manufacturing
industry, the gulf between them being routine subject of commentary and
of sociological analysis, and at times of political debate.32 One does not
have to be a Marxist, to find it difficult to conceive of the core of a ruling
class that does not incorporate the leaders of manufacturing industry.
Bourdieu placed particular emphasis on the intellectual capital of the
French ‘state nobility’, but finance capitalists of the City of London seem to
have been happy to remain intellectually undercapitalized over a very long
period. Only a minority attended university, if they did, their education
was not related at all to their professional activities, and they were seldom
persuaded to enlist the intellectual capital of the universities by tied dona-
tions to establish schools to prepare students for careers in the City. They
seem, in fact, to have been wholly satisfied with their traditional practice-
based training. Even their social capital, accumulated at public schools and
in the army, and honed in their London clubs, seems in hindsight, to have
been less than effective, whether as a ruling class, or even in their own
specialist domain. One cannot help but notice the curious fact that the
century over which their were supposedly ruling coincides with the trans-
formation of Britain from being the most unequal capitalist society, as we
noticed it was in 1875, to being among the most egalitarian, as it had
become by 1975. Perhaps this was mere coincidence, or maybe they were
rather inattentive to what Williamson called the ‘unambiguous, pronounced
and pervasive’ egalitarian levelling taking place on their watch. Moreover,
the moment the world they controlled was opened to international market
forces, in the ‘Big Bang’ of 1986, which this supposed ruling class proved
powerless to resist, they were shown to be mere boutique owners, and were
swept away by large foreign financial institutions, and along with their old
school or regimental ties, and their upper class manners. But this is a later
part of the story. The more important point here is that, even in its heyday,
financial leaders lacked the power, or apparently the desire, to dominate
other institutions and the way of life of society at large, as its aristocratic
predecessors had effortlessly done, and as the Soviet nomenklatura was able
to do, and to a lesser extent French corpsards still do.
In 2002, the argument that Britain has an upper class with ‘money at its
core’, that its ‘central members are capitalists, very wealthy individuals’
who have ‘for the most part inherited their money’, was restated by Roberts,
unfortunately without any supporting evidence, apparently in the belief it
was self-evident.33 This upper class, he claimed, has a pronounced tendency
to inter-marry, and whilst it is ‘recruiting new blood constantly’, it is also
‘cautious over admission to its inner circles’, so ‘outsiders can find it dif-
ficult to obtain admission.’ It is, he claimed, ‘unusually well-integrated’,
‘extremely well-organized’, indeed ‘contemporary Britain’s best example of
a well-knit class’, and its members’ ‘personal networks interlock’, so that
‘the entire class is bound in an exclusive system of interpersonal relation-
ships.’ In his view, ‘the clearest of all class divisions’ separates them from
the rest of the population. Social and sporting events enable the members
of this class to ‘meet all the people they need to know.’ He mentions grouse,
partridge and pheasant shooting, stag and fox hunting, the Derby, Grand
National, Wimbledon, Henley, Cowes, especially their royal enclosures, as
well as conferences of the Institute of Directors, the Confederation of British
Industry, and London clubs, none of which he appears to have attended.
His picture is slightly marred by his admission that although this upper
class is ‘currently the most powerful of classes’, indeed a ruling class, it
is the middle class that ‘supplies nearly all our current members of Par-
liament.’ However, it does not, he explains, exercise political power directly,
and when members of it deal with government personnel, they ‘are most
likely to be speaking for their entire class’ and ‘can expect its views to be
heeded’ and ‘its wishes to be decisive, whether the issue is joining the euro,
setting statutory minimum pay, a ceiling on working hours, parental leave
or trade union rights.’ Moreover, it is also a ‘submerged’ class that ‘has no
need to explain and justify itself in person’, since its power is ‘consolidated
by its ability to act as a class’, and since the ‘media are mostly in upper
class ownership’, and ‘the owners are accustomed to seeing their views in
print, (though usually without their names attached).’
Perhaps in sociology courses at the University of Liverpool, where Roberts
teaches, the solidarity of the upper class might be self-evident, but the rest
of us would like evidence, and it seems difficult to find. For instance, some
of the best available information about a small sample of this supposed
class with ‘money at its core’ the pinnacle of it, is to be found in the Sunday
Times Rich List of the 1,000 wealthiest people in Britain.34 The 2004 list
recorded that less than quarter (241) had inherited their wealth, and only
33 of the 1,000 were hereditary peers. On the face of things, it is difficult to
discover what the class bond between those on this list might have been,
since a significant minority are foreign-born and educated, (in the 2006 list
some 16%) and apart from property owners, they include the self-made
entrepreneurs from almost every kind of industry, packaging, fitness clubs,
double-glazing, car parks, steel, on-line betting, a large number of pop stars,
entertainers and sportsmen, a novelist, as well as denizens of the City, hedge
fund managers, and 12 employees of Goldman Sachs. It is certainly not
self-evident why these people should form a class, or have a common view
on the euro, or anything else, or why they should have any common inter-
ests in conflict with that of other members of the population. Presumably
they all prefer an efficient, growing and full-employment economy, but
large proportions of the electorate seem to share that preference. Roberts
suggested that it differed from the working class because the latter, in his
view, preferred ‘matters to be subject to collective agreement’, has a ‘yearn-
ing for the security of a planned economy and desire to limit the scope of
the market by guaranteeing certain basic social rights and gearing social
services – health and education – entirely to need or merit.’
Contrary to Roberts, much evidence suggests that Britain’s elites are not
‘unusually well-integrated’, ‘extremely well-organized’ or well-knit’, but in
fact inhabit rather separate worlds. In 1975, for instance, Christoph com-
mented on the distinctive ‘segregation’ of British legislative and civil service
elites, both from one another and from other elites. He noticed, for instance,
‘the virtual exclusion from the top political executive of persons from other
walks of life, such as business, law, technology, trade unionism or academia.
Whilst members of parliament ‘may have started in other occupations …
by the time they have become ministers they have lost touch with develop-
ments in them…. Direct recruitment (of ministers) from outside parliament
is extremely rare, and its results not considered so persuasive as to warrant
revision of long-standing convention.’35 Kavanagh and Richards similarly
noticed that the professionalization of political careers, the rise of the full-
time career politician, has ‘produced a fragmentation in elites’ in Britain.
They observed that ‘to do well … MPs are best advised to enter the House
of Commons early, say before 35’, and without explaining the source of
their data, they added that ‘a choice of first occupation … may be influenced
by the anticipation of a political career. In 1997, one-tenth of MPs came
from a para-political occupation, such as employment in party head-
quarters, a spell as special advisor to a politician or work with a think tank
or policy body. The figure would be higher, they added, if we included
employment in such occupations as media, public relations and lobbying.’36
This trend to professionalization of politics, to lifetime political careers, is
probably not unique to Britain, but in Britain it appears to have entailed
the separation of political elite from other elites whereas in our three other
societies they remained integrated: in Soviet Russia because socialism entailed
political control of economic activity, in France because of pantouflage, and in
the United States because of the spoils system and the mobility between
political and corporate elites that it has promoted.37 In Britain, the prior
professionalization of the civil service seems, by contrast, to have inhibited
integration with the political or economic elite. Civil servants imposed
rules on themselves which prevented them taking part in any political
activities. Christoph noted that, by contrast with either the French or the
American, the British civil service elite ‘does not serve as an instrument for
systematically recruiting talent into other elites, whether they be members
of parliament, political executives, local government officials, or managers
in the private sector … few civil servants trade places in Whitehall for ones
elsewhere’.38 Kavanagh and Richards observed that ‘the difference of tem-
perament between politician and civil servant, arising from different atti-
tudes to partisanship, expertise and personal publicity’ is ‘perhaps more
important’ than any formal rules.39 They did not say whether their common
public school backgrounds helped to bridge this ‘difference of temperament’.
The industrial elite seems to have been especially segregated from the
rest, mainly because, until recently, its new members were largely drawn
from those with practice-based training and experience rather than elite
educational qualifications. Granick brought together six studies of the back-
ground of senior managers in British industry through the 1950s, 1960s,
and 1970s, and it was on the basis of this evidence that, as we noted at the
beginning of this investigation, he decided that Britain was the most egali-
tarian and open of the industrial societies he studied. ‘Education’, he observed,
‘serves in only a minimal fashion as a preselector of viable candidates for
British top management …. only 7 to 14% of the top executives have a
truly elitist university education, in contrast to three-quarters of the Admin-
istrative Class of the civil service, and only a heavily overlapping 11% of
business executives have an elitist secondary education.’40 Chairmen of the
companies may have been public school alumni, but their senior executives
evidently were not.
In 1975 Fidler conducted an unusual study of the manufacturing elite in
that he interviewed a sample of 144 chairmen and chief executives of large
British companies, rather than the standard method of cataloguing their
assets and directorships. He discovered that these manufacturing leaders

did not see themselves as members of a ruling or upper class at all. Nearly
all of them (84%) saw themselves ‘as part of a largish middle class’.41 Apart
from participation in hospital and university boards, they took little part in
local government affairs. They were somewhat more likely to participate in
national bodies of various kinds, including business-government commit-
tees, boards of nationalized industries, and quangos, quasi-autonomous
non-governmental organizations, but only eight sat in the House of Lords,
and three in the House of Commons. Whilst they were inclined to think
that their predecessors had participated more in both local and national
government, Fidler could only conclude that ‘The command posts of …
industry and the state are not held by the same men.’42 In passing he noticed
another rift. These business leaders had virtually no links at all with the
military elite.
His business leaders also gave their views of the power structure of Britain –
as it seemed to them in 1975. Most thought that the government and civil
service controlled business, and were inclined to think that the political
power of private capital was minimal. In their view, trade union leaders
had more power, since they could veto government action, while they them-
selves could only hope to influence government policy.43 Their only recourse
in the face of a government decision they disliked was, they said, to publicize
its adverse effects for business. They did not feel they had any other means
of applying pressure. Whatever may once have been the case, personal con-
tacts were not the basis of a close relationship between government and
business. Private clubs were insignificant, and only four of the sample of 144
mentioned them. Formal pressure via the Confederation of British Industry
was considered highly unsatisfactory, because the CBI had the impossible
task of representing all businesses.44 Trade associations were rather better in
this respect, but the most widely used form of contact was what Fidler
called the ‘direct semi-formal contact’, an invitation to a minister to discuss
matters over lunch. This was, however, only possible for the very largest
companies, and the chief executives of these companies told Fidler that
they were then most reluctant to be seen lobbying selfishly for their own
companies.45
Comparative network analyses of interlocking directorships of financial and
industrial businesses in ten countries a decade later raised doubts whether
British businessmen even had a high degree of solidarity amongst them-
selves.46 They reported that France had the highest proportion of multiple
directors of the ten and Britain the lowest, and that Britain also had the
loosest, least integrated, least centralized network of directorships of all ten
of the countries studied. ‘The British network stood out’, Ziegler concluded,
‘for its low level of interlocking’. The ‘cumulation of directorships and
strength of inter-corporate links, as measured by their multiplicity, were
both extremely low. Moreover, while ‘the American network displayed a
similar structure’ when compared with the other eight countries, it was
nevertheless ‘rather more densely connected’ than the British.47
Comparative research over recent decades therefore supports the view
that Britain’s elites have been, distinctively segregated from one another.48
There is, however, another kind of evidence to which we may turn to deter-
mine the degree of elite integration. In examining both the formation of
the French ruling class and the possibility of an American counterpart, we
tried to observe a ruling class in action, over time, by its deeds, by ‘issue
areas’, and by outcomes favourable to it. In France, we observed both the
long-term relationship between political and economic elites, and relatively
recent ‘outcomes’, such as the pioneering of e-commerce by Minitel that
rested on ‘collusion’ or collaboration between them. In the United States,
by contrast, we noted how the political elite, as a result of overwhelming
electoral pressure, had been forced into a permanently adversarial relation-
ship with the economic elite, and for that reason, among others, were not
persuaded that they had together formed a ruling class. We may now con-
duct an analogous investigation of the British political and economic elites,
in the hope that institutional and policy outcomes might enable us infer,
or even observe, links between them – resting on either the old school tie
or simply their wealth – that would entitle us to conclude that they were
part of a ruling class.
‘Issue areas’ as a measure of elite integration
Since the relationship between the state and private industry in Britain has
followed an altogether different course from that of either France or the
United States, one cannot expect to find ‘issue areas’ which exactly match
theirs. Regulation of industry in Britain began in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, and was not intended, as regulation was in the United States, to enforce
competition between businesses, but only to improve conditions for those
least able to bargain with employers for themselves, notably women and
children in mines and factories, or to protect the environment. Electoral
pressure in the two countries pressed in quite different directions.49 Regula-
tion to preserve market competition is a much more recent concern in
Britain, and never in fact appears to have been propelled by electoral pres-
sure. It may be said to have begun with the establishment of the Monopolies
Commission in 1948. Industrial policies, comparable to the French, other
than those adopted during, or as a result of, the two World Wars, were an
even more recent innovation, and proved rather short-lived, being adopted
only over the years 1964–1979, in the interval one might say between the
loss of faith in public ownership and the re-discovery of the virtues of markets.
However, we may take these two policies – the regulation of market com-
petition after 1948 and the industrial policies during the World Wars and
between 1964–1979 – as occasions when the relationship between economic
and political elites in Britain most closely resembled their American and
French counterparts respectively, and consider whether they provide
evidence of their integration and therefore of a class relationship.
The Monopolies Commission, established shortly after World War II, which
later became the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC), was the main
agent of British competition policy for the next 50 years, and its work
has been minutely, and masterfully, documented over the 50 years from
1948–1998 by Wilks.50 Over this period, other bodies, such as the Restrictive
Practices Court, the Prices and Incomes Board and the Price Commission
were at times created to promote competition policy. These sometimes
adopted a different, and more adversarial approach towards industry, but
the first was sidelined, and the second and third both abolished. The MMC,
by contrast was ‘the great survivor’, and as Wilks observed, its ‘culture and
procedures seem to have passed the basic Darwinian test of evolutionary
success.’51
He summarized his findings by identifying what he called the ‘genetic
code’ of regulation in Britain over the second half of the twentieth century.
Its main components were that regulation was bipartisan, that it left con-
siderable discretion with civil servants, that it was built on a voluntaristic
and cooperative relationship with industry, (and altogether excluded the
courts and third party actions), was therefore non-punitive, and finally, was
based on an ad hoc interpretation of the public interest. As a result, British
competition policy, in Wilks’ words, preserved ‘a proper sphere of auto-
nomy for business’, and allowed industry a high degree of ‘self-regulation’.
After more than 400 investigations, the Commission had still never codified
rules about the acceptable and the unacceptable features of monopolies
and mergers. For Wilks, ‘the central paradox’ in its history is that the mem-
bers never committed to paper an agreed definition of the ‘public interest’,
though they always acted, he thought, as if ‘they know it when they see
it.’52 Generations of politicians and civil servants working under an unwritten
constitution, had, of course, thought exactly the same thing.
This ‘genetic code’ was a world away from the principled, punitive and
adversarial regulation of private industry in the United States. Since the
same contrast is observable over the history of environmental regulation in
the two countries, it is reasonable to infer a fundamental difference in the
relationship between the political and economic elites in the two countries.53
And since we earlier argued that the adversarial and punitive American regula-
tory approach limited the possibilities of class collusion between American
political and economic elites, we might assume that the MMC would allow
or even encourage the exact opposite. Its reluctance to impose strict rules of
evidence in its hearings, to sub poena witnesses or even to admit lawyers, its
preference for ‘site visits’ and private discussions with employers, and for
industrial self-regulation, seem precisely the kind of procedures in which
class connections and sympathies, and relaxed and affable relationships
fostered by ‘the old school tie’ and club connections, could swing the out-
come of the decision-making processes of the Commission. In short, we
might assume that the genetic code was a class code.
Wilks’ evidence does not, for a second, favour such an interpretation. He
noted a certain distance between the members of the Commission and
the leaders of the industries they examined, and never once implied that
the barristers and academics serving part-time on the MMC panels which
examined cases were ever in the pockets of the industrialists whose firms
were the subject of their investigations, or that the industrialists ever made
any attempt to ‘capture’ them. He referred only to the ‘mutual respect and
accommodation’ between the two sides, which never compromised, or shed
the least doubt on the independence of the Commission. Their reports did
not, on the face of things, suggest any shared class strategy, unless one takes
the view that the absence of recommendations of heavy fines or prison sen-
tences is proof enough. Perhaps the shared class interest, and the old school
tie, became significant at a higher level, beyond the scope of Wilks’ investi-
gation, when civil servants and politicians who decided what to do about
MMC recommendations.
As it happens, when we consider the attempts to implement industrial
policies in the wake of World Wars, and between 1964–1979 we can con-
sider the chances of class collaboration at this higher level, since such pol-
icies necessarily involve close and continuous relationships between chief
executives and senior managers of selected firms and ministers and senior
officials of government departments.
The first example concerns the attempt of the British government after
World War I, to advance the research, development and production of light
alloys and in particular aluminium, which were the prerequisite of the con-
struction of all-metal airframes, and the foundation therefore of the
modern aircraft industry.54 A similar effort was being made by the U.S. gov-
ernment. Both governments had benefited from their inspections of
German research laboratories, but after the war, the allies became rivals.
Graham compared their efforts, together with leading firms in the two
countries, to develop these alloys for aircraft production. Her evidence
showed that the research of the main British contender, Vickers, proceeded
in complete ignorance of government research at the National Physical
Laboratory, as well as from academic research, and that of other private
companies. There was not the least sign that class connections facilitated
the collaboration of this major armaments manufacturer with the govern-
ment. On the contrary, it was the absence of any such collaboration that
was the main reason, in Graham’s view, for Vickers’ relative failure. By con-
trast, the much smaller and later-starting, but ultimately more successful,
American contender, Alcoa, had all kinds of continuous relationships with
the Department of Defense, and with each of the armed services, as well as
with academic research institutions. It was therefore the beneficiary of a
steady flow of information from these sources, which was supplemented and
reinforced by the mobility of personnel between the civilian and military state
agencies, academia and its own research laboratories. In Graham’s view, this
was the main reason for Alcoa’s ultimate success.
The second case study concerns the efforts of the British government after
World War II, to reap the benefits of Britain’s wartime lead in the develop-
ment of computers, by creating a commercially-successful computer indus-
try under the auspices of a government funding and co-ordinating agency,
the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC). This was headed,
as it happened, by an astonishingly far-sighted hereditary peer, who would
figure in any account of the British ruling class.55 His efforts, and those of
the NRDC, however, came to naught, since the interested firms declined to
convey their real concerns or real plans to him or to his officials, and failed
to establish close and trusting relationships with other government agen-
cies or departments engaged in related research, or with the military. For its
part, the government remained impartial and aloof. It had an ‘obsession’,
as Hendry put it, with being ‘fair’ to all firms. In the event, this meant that
all of them were kept equally in the dark about research which the govern-
ment was itself conducting or financing elsewhere, with disastrous con-
sequences for the programme’s stated aim, the development of a computer
industry in Britain.
Neither of these case studies suggests that the British ruling class was par-
ticularly cohesive, or that the public school education, which many of the
leading players involved had doubtless experienced, helped them to recog-
nize a shared class interest in advancing the cause of particular firms, or of
British industry as a whole. And there is no reason to think that these two
examples are isolated exceptions. Reynolds and Coates reviewed many
industrial policies since World War II, including those during the period
1964–1979 when governments often attempted to follow French example.
Their work is a catalogue of failures, which is why the Thatcher governments
turned vehemently against such policies. Reynolds and Coates found them
to be ‘voluntarist, never directional’, ‘reactive and passive rather than strategic
and anticipatory’, ‘limited in scope, and largely self-defeating, being too
rushed and ill-thought out to be successful.’56 Their failure tends to support
the conclusions of the aluminium and computer case studies, namely that
industrial policies have not worked in Britain because of the absence of the
kind of close and continuous collaboration between the political and eco-
nomic elites that one would expect to find if these elites had a strong class
solidarity and were part of a ruling class. Their evidence, therefore, like that
of Wilks of the MMC, tends to support the argument that British elites
have lacked the cohesion, convertibility and polyvalence of their Soviet
and French counterparts. Those two countries modernized with integrated
political and economic elites, in Britain modernity meant that they became
more differentiated.
Had the English aristocracy been overthrown or displaced in one go,

especially a violent go, it might have been easier for a new ruling class to
emerge, since their successors might then have been prompted to justify
themselves and recreate political, administrative and educational insti-
tutions more in keeping with their own values, and these might have pro-
vided the basis for a cohesive and well-defined ruling class.57 In the event,
the ruling aristocracy was progressively displaced by a rather disparate col-
lection of elites, drawn disproportionately from public schools to be sure,
but having been socialized by varied and distinctive kinds of practice-based
training, and advancing into elite positions by different career routes. They
therefore tended to form and to inhabit rather separate worlds. In all prob-
ability, one of the reasons why British politicians have been rather less prone
to corruption than either French or American politicians is that close rela-
tionships and inter-elite careers are less common, and hence the personal
obligations and contacts that facilitate corruption are also less common.
In the end, therefore we have failed to identify a ruling or upper class
that has succeeded the aristocracy, merely rather heterogeneous elites. Their
manners, and accents, and their leisure pursuits no doubt owe much to the
public school education that many of them shared, and a fair proportion
may end up in the House of Lords, but these do not seem quite sufficient to
form a class interest or class consciousness. Apart perhaps from a few socio-
logists, English people seem to have had the same difficulty in identifying
a ruling class. They have therefore colloquially used a variety of terms to
describe elites with exceptional power, wealth or status such as ‘the estab-
lishment’, ‘upper class’, the ‘political class’, the ‘great and the good’, ‘the
chattering classes’, or ‘fat cats’. Each of these has enjoyed a certain brief
currency, and caught one or other of the characteristics of one or other of
these elites, but no settled collective term to embrace them all has yet
caught on.
The middle class organizes in corporate form
Ever since the landholding aristocracy began to be displaced by rival elites,

the pinnacle of the class system has been losing something of its clarity and
coherence, but the system survived and flourished nonetheless, because the
middle and working class were over the same period organizing and defining
themselves as classes. Our next step therefore is to trace how they did this,
and we must begin, as we did with the aristocracy, with the distinctive rela-
tionship between the state and civil society. While the aristocracy may
have taken the leading role in defining and legitimating that relationship
during the Glorious Revolution, these same events are also the key to under-
standing the later emergence and organization of both the middle and
working classes. Besides securing for the indefinite future the rights of the
corporate institution of the aristocracy and gentry, which is what Parliament
then was, the Glorious Revolution simultaneously protected and legitimized

the corporate institutions around which both the middle and working classes
were eventually to coalesce and organize. The aristocracy was therefore the
path-breaker and the other two classes followed in its footsteps.
The middle class is sometimes presented as a nineteenth century inven-
tion, probably because the term itself then came to be commonly used. The
Great Reform Act of 1832 had brought its members into the political
nation, and institutionalized their separation from the non-voting working
class, and the Anti-Corn Law League in the early 1840s suggested it had
political clout. It also then became increasingly more noticeable, both cul-
turally and numerically. In fact, however, the middle class was of much
more ancient origin, and had begun to emerge long before the Glorious
Revolution. Gretton pointed out that the charters granted to guilds in the
twelfth century ‘opened the door to a certain independence of the lords’
for urban merchants and craftsmen in several cities, most notably in London,
and by the fourteenth century there can no longer be ‘any doubt of the
existence of a class, distinctly separable from the rest in its aims, its pur-
suits, its methods, its purposes and its share of the national existence.’
Merchants and craftsmen were joined by professionals, displaying what he
thought was the ‘characteristic quality of development’ of the middle class,
‘individualism protected by privileged combination.’58 For many genera-
tions, however, there was only one significant ‘privileged combination’, the
four inns of court. They emerged in the mid-fourteenth century when legal
practitioners who appeared in the royal courts in London had converted
four of the inns in which they met, dined and discussed legal issues into
permanent, residential, self-governing communal institutions. With the sup-
port of the judges, though without any express legal or royal authority,
these inns had assumed responsibility for training and admitting those
who wished to join them and practice in the royal courts. Some time later,
physicians in London formed a similar corporate body, but it was only in
1518 that their informal meetings were granted a royal charter which
authorized them to perform similar regulatory functions.
English monarchs seem to have lacked the inclination and incentive, as
well as the administrative apparatus, to routinely regulate the affairs of the
guilds or ‘companies’, as guilds with royal charters came to be called, or the
professional bodies. They made no effort to try and improve the quality of
guild workmanship, or to interfere with their forms of training, and apart
from the royal armouries, did not establish any royal institutions compara-
ble to the manufactures royales in France.59 Nor was there any equivalent to
the bureau des parties casuelles which sold guild masters their own status
and rank, and converted them into quasi-officials.60 English guilds did not,
however, escape various kinds of personal, ad hoc royal interference. Once
English monarchs hit on the idea of increasing their incomes by granting
favoured courtiers and ‘projectors’ a monopoly of the trade or manufacture
of a specified product, in return for a share of the promised returns, they

began to grant personal monopolies that frequently infringed on the juris-
dictions of long-established City of London companies.61 It is unclear who
was the first to do this, but the number of these personal monopolies greatly
increased in the later part of Elizabeth’s reign. In response to repeated com-
plaints from the City, themselves an indication of a shared class interest,
she expressed her dismay and promised to abandon the practice in her
Golden Speech of 1601.62 James I evidently did not feel bound by her
promise, and resumed the granting of charters to favoured courtiers, until
1624 when he too felt obliged to respond to the hostility they aroused.63
London merchants, it seems, drew a sharp distinction between artificial,
royally-created monopolies granted to a single individual, and those granted
to groups, like themselves, earning their living in a particular line of trade
or manufacturing, and organized as a company or guild.
As James did not feel bound by Elizabeth, so Charles I did not feel bound
by his father’s promise, and the chartering of monopolies to royal favourites
therefore resumed, and even increased, during his 11 years of ‘thorough’
government without Parliaments from 1629 to 1640. When he was finally
compelled in 1640, to recall Parliament, to raise funds for an army to deal
with the rebellious Scots, his grants of monopoly were one of the main
items on the list of grievances which the Long Parliament presented to him
in its ‘Grand Remonstrance’. In large measure, they explain why London
was so strongly for the Parliamentary cause. Many of the individual mono-
polies ‘managed by gentlemen to the exclusion of traders’ were revoked
before the outbreak of the Civil War, but the charters of corporately-
organized monopolies were frequently renewed under the Commonwealth
and Protectorate, despite the vociferous complaints of those who were
excluded or suffered from them.64
The issue of corporate autonomy of chartered bodies was, however, far
from settled, and was reopened by the writs of quo warranto issued by
Charles II which initiated the second and concluding stage of the English
Revolution, and to which we have already referred. Whilst Charles’ primary
aim was, no doubt, to control the selection of members of Parliament, his
writs were served on the City of London and its livery and trading com-
panies, a host of chartered bodies in other cities, the professions, the Royal
College of Physicians and the London Society of Apothecaries and the
Company of Barber-Surgeons, and even some chartered schools.65 His attack
on Parliament, the corporate body of the aristocracy and gentry, was there-
fore also an attack on the corporate institutions of their inferiors, the emer-
gent middle class of merchants and professionals. As far as they were
concerned, everything hinged on the fate of the writ issued in January
1682 against the City of London, the most powerful, and most ancient,
chartered body of all. The hearing in the King’s Bench did not begin until
February 1683. Defense counsel joined in a demurrer, which meant that
the suit would be tried as a matter of law before judges alone, rather than as a
matter of fact before a jury, which in hindsight was an unwise decision. The
city’s counsel seems to have been calculating that their fellow lawyers would
better withstand royal pressure than carefully vetted laymen of a jury.66 He
argued, echoing Coke’s celebrated words on corporations in the Sutton’s
Hospital case, that the Crown could not take action against chartered bodies
because they are ‘invisible, immortal, cannot be outlawed, cannot commit
Treason or Felony, cannot be excommunicate, hath no Soul, cannot do
Fealty, cannot be imprisoned, are not subject to Imbecility or Death.’ Counsel
for the King replied that ‘if charters be not forfeit, there would be so many
little commonwealths, by themselves independent of the Crown, in defiance
of it, little republics would spring up all over the Kingdom which would
not be conducive to good government.’67
In October, 1683, the judgement went in favour of the Crown. And once
the mighty City of London had fallen, many other chartered bodies, includ-
ing those of the medical professions, decided to surrender their charters
immediately, even before they were challenged in the courts in the hope of
obtaining more favourable consideration from the King.68 The re-issued
and ‘remodelled’ charters commonly purged existing officers whose loyalty
to the king was in doubt, and made clear that in the future all the elected
wardens, assistants, clerks and other officers of the companies would require
royal approval, leaving little doubt that the goal of both Charles and James
was to subordinate all chartered bodies to royal authority.69 As if to empha-
size the beginning of a new relationship with the crown, James whimsically
decided that the name of the College of Physicians should be changed to
the Faculty of Physic of London, borrowed from the French.70
In all Charles and James issued some 239 writs of quo warranto, and though
they were the most important means of extending their control over cor-
porate bodies, there were others. Some were controlled by the appointment
of so-called ‘regulators’. The universities were monitored by means of a
special commission to exercise visitorial jurisdiction, which in 1687 decided
to appoint a new vice-chancellor at Oxford, and to replace in their entirety
the master and fellows of Magdalen College.71 The inns of court had no
charter as we have observed. Their autonomy rested on custom ‘time out of
mind’, but they were included in this new framework of government by
the appointment of large numbers of King’s Counsel who were directly
responsible to the King, and who the inns were forced to grant precedence
on their governing bodies, their benches.72 The means therefore varied, but
the aim was always the same: to create the institutional infrastructure of
royal absolutism, or as one historian put it, ‘the seventeenth century equi-
valent of a modern dictatorship’.73 While their father had simply sought to
assert his absolute rights, Charles II and James II were determined to create
permanent institutional foundations for absolute rule. Charles could hardly
have been more explicit about his purpose. After keeping the representa-
tives of the Grocers’ Company kicking their heels for a considerable time,
the king’s secretary emerged to tell them that ‘the King was not disposed to
deprive them of their property or powers but desired only a regulation of
the governing part, so that his majesty might for the future have in himself
a moving power of any officer therein for mismanagement, in the same
way and method that they themselves now used, and claimed to have
power derivable from the crown.’74
As opposition to his rule mounted, James recognized his disastrous mistake,
and in mid-October 1688 issued a proclamation restoring all charters whose
surrender had not been enrolled, and returning others that had in their ori-
ginal form. But it was too late to save his throne.75 After William and Mary
had accepted the Declaration of Rights, and Parliament felt reasonably sure
of its own rights, it turned to secure those of the City of London in the
most emphatic terms. In 1689 it ‘disinterred, reviled and comprehensively
overturned’ the Kings Bench decision of 1683, which it declared to be ‘illegal
and arbitrary’. It restored the ‘mayor and commonalty and citizens to their
ancient liberties’ declaring that these ‘should never henceforward be for-
feited for any cause whatsoever’, and ‘could only be dissolved by the death,
or refusal to act, of its members’, and extended the annulment to all the
City’s livery companies.76 This is as close as Parliament came to a statutory
declaration of the rights of corporate bodies. All the other municipal, trading,
and professional chartered bodies were left to sort out for themselves, often
through litigation, whether their ‘liberties and privileges’ derived from
their original, surrendered, remodelled or restored charter.
The new king was, therefore, never legally deprived of the right to challenge
the government of chartered bodies, but the significant fact is that neither
William nor any subsequent monarch or parliament ever sought to assert a
right to nominate, approve or purge the officers of any chartered body. Levin
pointed out that this left ‘borough corporations … virtually free of all central
control’ and enabled ‘corrupt and virtually unassailable pockets of power’ to
establish themselves in many towns and cities. It also allowed professional
bodies to run their affairs much as they wished. Before the Glorious
Revolution, every monarch had felt free to instruct the inns of court on a
variety of matters – to expel Catholics, or attorneys, to appoint a certain
preacher, or to improve their dress or their military preparedness, and so
forth.77 After the Glorious Revolution, no monarch ever tried to do so, nor did
Parliament, and it was therefore a decisive turning point, perhaps the decisive
turning point, in the history of the relationship between state and civil society
in England. Parliament, the corporate body of the aristocracy and gentry, may
be its best known beneficiary, but the city of London and its companies,
the inns of court, the Royal College of Physicians, the Company of Barber-
Surgeons, the Society of Apothecaries, the chartered boroughs and all the
other ‘little commonwealths’ and ‘little republics’ in the kingdom, whether
corrupt or honest, benefited equally from it.
For some decades thereafter, barristers and physicians remained alone,

solitary, self-governing, proud and exclusive little professional commun-
ities, disturbed only by the activities of practitioners of inferior adjacent
occupations, especially when they decided that they too would like to protect
themselves from market competition, and obtain similar status and rights of
corporate self-government. As far as we can tell, the new pretenders usually
proceeded in much the same manner as barristers and physicians before
them, that is to say, they met in inns, hostelries or dining places, alerted
fellow practitioners whom they considered of comparable skill and respect-
ability, agreed on ethical rules of practice and a form of self-government,
chose their leaders, and then approached the Privy Council or Parliament
for a charter which would formally grant them powers comparable to those
of the two ancient professions. The process was sometimes contentious,
and usually lengthy. Decades and often generations might pass between
the first informal meetings of practitioners and the grant of a royal charter,
during which rival or geographically-separated groups of practitioners could
come together, and the members of existing chartered bodies could satisfy
themselves about the competence, probity and jurisdiction of the new-
comers, since vociferous opposition from an existing chartered body could
easily sabotage any petition to the Privy Council.
Surgeons were already members of a corporate body, the Company of
Barber-Surgeons, so in their case it was first necessary to break away and
form their own college, which they did in 1745. They only overcame all
the misgivings and objections of physicians and obtained a royal charter in
1800. Civil engineers, though organized in the late eighteenth century,
were granted one in 1818, and solicitors, an elite of whom had been organ-
ized in London since 1739, had to wait for the best part of a century to
overcome five centuries of obloquy accumulated by attorneys. They were
granted a charter in 1831. Architects followed in 1837, pharmacists in
1843, veterinary surgeons in 1844, mechanical engineers in 1847, actuaries
in 1848, accountants in 1880 and surveyors in 1881. After this date,
the ‘mass’ mobilization of the English professions began. ‘Approximately a
dozen new associations appeared in each decade between 1880 and 1910,
and from 1910 to 1950 the formation rate of new associations increased to
roughly two dozen in each decade.’78 Only a minority of them received
royal charters. Others were incorporated, while yet others had to settle for a
lesser form of recognition, perhaps only permission to drop the legally
required ‘ltd’ from their title to distinguish them from commercial corpora-
tions. While members of Parliament occasionally found fault with the
way one or other profession exercised their powers, they evidently saw no
risk in delegating powers to numerous ‘little commonwealths’ and ‘little
republics’, and remained entirely sympathetic to self-regulation. Indeed,
they seem to have considered the professions as scarcely less entitled to the
protection of the unwritten constitution than Parliament itself, a view they
continued to hold until late in the twentieth century, and the election of
Mrs Thatcher.
Although later professions modelled themselves on the two originals,
barristers and physicians, their circumstances meant that few of them
could hope to achieve anything like the same degree of autonomy, self-
government, and control over their claimed jurisdictions, or obtain the
same high status. However, they usually obtained comparable powers, and
tried, in their differing circumstances, to behave in similar ways. They
usually insisted, for instance, on a mandatory period of practice-based train-
ing before awarding their own credentials, their own ‘call to the bar’ to
those they deemed worthy of admission, and like the bar they usually ignored
the universities and their degrees. They also staked out jurisdictions, pro-
mulgated codes of ethics, and collectively sought to uphold their status by
distinguishing themselves from those performing contiguous but more
routine clerical and mechanical tasks they deemed less honourable.79 Civil
engineers therefore distinguished themselves from ‘mechanicals’, architects
from builders, accountants and actuaries from book-keepers, surveyors
from stewards, bailiffs and foremen, and bankers from cashiers.
The professionalization of civil servants, to which we have already referred,
deserves a moment’s attention since it illustrates the way in which an
employed occupation which, for obvious reasons, could never assert a right
to self-government comparable to those of the self-employed practitioners
of the two ancient professions, was nonetheless able to mimic their behav-
iour in a setting that might seem to lead inevitably towards Weber’s ‘iron
cage’ of bureaucracy. By the mid-nineteenth century, personal patronage,
which had hitherto been the main method of recruitment to the service,
was widely recognized to have made efficient working methods and organ-
ization impossible. In 1854, Northcote and Trevelyan were asked by Gladstone,
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to draw up a plan to eliminate it.80 They
were not in the least impressed or influenced by the experience and bureau-
cratic structures of continental state administrations, nor needless to say by
Jacksonian notions of democratic public administration in the United States.
Their main inspiration was the Indian Civil Service, in which Trevelyan
had served, and less explicitly perhaps, the ancient professions. Northcote was
a barrister. They therefore concentrated on the selection of the topmost level
of the service, the elite that might be compared with established profes-
sions, ignored ‘menial’ civil servants, and did not therefore try to define
administrative principles for the service as a whole.81 Their main recom-
mendation was that the elite of the service should be selected by an exam-
ination open to Oxford and Cambridge graduates or graduands, not because
they expected or wanted either institution to provide any relevant training,
but simply because they were the most likely sources of able and suitable
candidates. Northcote and Trevelyan had almost nothing to say about the
training their elite should receive after they had been selected, or the scope
of their responsibilities, and they did not suggest any form of public or par-
liamentary scrutiny of their conduct. In other words, even though these
new civil servants were part of the administration of the state, they were to
be trusted to organize and conduct themselves much as if they too were a
self-governing profession.
In the century after the implementation of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms
in 1870, the evidence suggests this is exactly what the ‘first division clerks’
who passed the examinations and selection boards did. They, and their suc-
cessors, known first as ‘the administrative class’, then the ‘unified grades’, and
currently the ‘fast stream’, adapted to their own very distinctive work con-
ditions behavioural norms and values similar to those of the ancient profes-
sions.82 They declined for instance, to institute any formal training process,
and were long hostile to it. They thought one learned what was important on
the job, not in a lecture hall, and by many accounts seem to have informally
institutionalized a relationship similar to that between a university tutor and
his tutee or a barrister and his pupil.83 They long declined to produce a code
of ethics, and left newcomers to absorb insensibly the ethics of the service and
its unwritten standards of conduct from the company of their seniors.84 They
also defined and defended their own occupational ‘mystery’ or jurisdiction.
This was, to quote Haldane’s celebrated definition, ‘the duty of investigation
and thought, as preliminary to action’, meaning advising ministers about the
translation of the policies of their government into practicable legislation and
administration.85 Over this work jurisdiction, they claimed an absolute sover-
eignty and, again like other professions, resisted interference from their
‘clients’, which in their case primarily meant government ministers, who were
not expected to involve themselves in internal departmental matters. They
have been, and remain, still more reticent about revealing details of their
internal workings, deliberations and disagreements to their other ‘clients’,
that is, parliament and the public at large.86 Having secured their own juris-
diction, they correspondingly accepted, like most established professions, that
they should not trespass on the jurisdictions of others. Hence – their self-
imposed rules against becoming involved in party politics, either in their
working or personal lives. In this respect, they probably made a decisive,
though unacknowledged, contribution to the development of Britain’s
unwritten constitution. Nor did they involve themselves excessively, in the
tasks of their subordinates, which became known as the executive or clerical
‘classes’ of the service.87 They had, as Mrs Thatcher discovered to her disgust,
little interest in managing their departments.88
No doubt, these subordinate classes came closer to bureaucratic forms of
organization, though since the ‘first division clerks’ and their successors had
little interest in directing and co-ordinating their work by conventional man-
agerial techniques, the service developed as a hierarchically co-ordinated
cluster of professional and semi-professional occupations, rather than as a
bureaucracy.89 Most of the subordinate occupations were also trained
on-the-job, also established their own distinct work jurisdictions, also had
their own separate career ladders, so that promotion from one to another
was akin to re-entering the service. Classes were typically organized in their
own exclusive, professional associations.90 Professional ideals and profes-
sional forms of organization gave the British civil service a distinctive struc-
ture and a distinctive public service ethic. Without reference to them, both
would remain a mystery.
The process of emulating the example of ancient self-governing profes-
sions has continued until contemporary times in all types of work, in-
formation systems engineers being one of the more recent examples.91 At
first sight, this would appear to be a process by which occupations distin-
guish themselves from one another, and almost the antithesis of class for-
mation, especially as the host of new professions or semi-professions never
expressed their class interests or federated as a class. When, for instance,
barristers, physicians, surgeons and apothecaries were threatened with writs
of quo warranto by Charles II and James II, they had made no attempt to act
together as a class. And they have never done so since. It never seems to
have occurred to their successors, when they and other professions were
subjected to the reforming zeal of Mrs Thatcher, that they might share a
common class interest in resisting state regulation of their domestic affairs.
Occupational interests and loyalties of professionals always took pre-
cedence over any wider class interests. Why then should we nevertheless
decide that they were the constituent units of the middle class?
Marx once compared French peasants to a sack of potatoes to illustrate the
point that proximity and common circumstances are not the same as class
formation. The preoccupation of English professionals with their own private
occupational interests might indicate that they were just another sack of pota-
toes, similarly devoid of class consciousness.92 These particular potatoes,
however, behaved in ways that Marx did not anticipate, for while selfishly
pursuing their own corporate interests, they continuously compared them-
selves with one another, used each other as reference groups, and continu-
ously examined each others’ background, behaviour, credentials to decide
whether they deserved parity of treatment and respect, or as we might say,
whether they should be considered members of the same class. Professional
histories are knee-deep in these comparative references. For most of their
history, for instance, English solicitors compared themselves with the bar,
which was the pole star, the one sure guide to the way to professionals ought
to behave, and the bar’s decision to recognize them as equals was the final
assurance that they had arrived. However, at various times solicitors also com-
pared themselves with physicians and surgeons, and with accountants and
estate agents, from whom they always tried to distance themselves.93 Other
professions were doing exactly the same thing. Mechanical engineers, for
instance, were comparing themselves with civil engineers, while all engineers
continuously referred back to barristers and physicians.94
These inter-professional comparisons were often made for a specific

purpose, to determine the proper form of their professional government, or
to decide on the appropriate policies for their corporate bodies, or to
achieve parity of treatment from the state, or from the universities, or to
argue that their salaried members were entitled to a rough parity of
reward.95 From the point of view of class formation and reproduction, it
may be that other, private, non-work comparisons and evaluations, of their
place of residence, its furnishings, of children’s education, of sons’ and
daughters’ spouses, of sporting and leisure pursuits, of vocabulary and
accent, of dress and haircut, and many other aspects of their style of life
were no less important. These daily comparisons and evaluations could
only be documented in memoirs novels, movies and TV shows though
since that has not yet been done, it is impossible to demonstrate that these
public and private inter-professional comparisons formed and defined the
core of the English middle class. Like Max Weber trying to demonstrate the
connection between the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, one
can only point to the affinity between organized professional behaviour
and some of the noticeable attributes of the middle class behaviour: emu-
lating or apeing one’s betters, disdaining one’s inferiors, maintaining certain
standards of behaviour, and at all times keeping up appearances.
Professionals v. entrepreneurs as class builders
Most observers of the middle class have not given professions quite such a
primary role. They have paid more attention to entrepreneurs and manu-
facturers, small employers, shopkeepers, and to their salaried, white collar
employees. The professions have in fact often been portrayed as neutrals in
the class confrontations of capitalist societies, as well-meaning bystanders,
and never actively engaged in the construction of classes. It is not difficult
to see why. If one starts out with the assumption that classes are economic
interest groups and their economic interests inevitably conflict, then the
irresistible corollary of the formation of the working class is that those on
the other side of the barricades, entrepreneurs and manufacturers, must
also be a class. They, after all, created the capitalist economy, employed the
workers, and they or their managers were the targets of trade union protest
and action, whereas professionals were employers on only a small scale,
and seldom involved in industrial disputes. If, however, one does not start
out with this assumption, it is entirely possible to acknowledge that there is
no necessary connection between creating a company, an industry, or even
an entire economy, and creating a class. Our evidence from Imperial Russia,
France and the United States lends support to this idea.
In Imperial Russia we found entrepreneurs had not formed a class by
themselves, had not contributed much to the formation of any other class,
and instead belonged to all classes. The French bourgeoisie was especially
elusive. It was once thought it must have been instigator, protagonist, and
ultimate victor of the great revolution, but after Taylor tracked every entre-
preneur in Paris at the time, and pointed out just how few of them there
were this view became untenable.96 Cobban and others then showed that
the pre-revolutionary French ‘bourgeoisie’ largely consisted of officeholders
and professionals.97 Although an organized bourgeoisie, consisting of capi-
talists, remained firmly entrenched in the minds both of social theorists
and of union organizers, few members of it stood up to proudly proclaim
their membership, and to organize the others. Our evidence suggested that
the more successful French entrepreneurs and manufacturers preferred to
be junior partners or affiliates of a class centred on the grands corps. Although
small-scale entrepreneurs and traders appeared, after World War II, in a
rather short-lived, heterogeneous class led by Pierre Poujade and Gérard
Nicoud, they appear to have been inspired more by the working class than
by the bourgeoisie. In the United States, entrepreneurs and manufacturers
certainly participated in the civic upper classes of several nineteenth century
cities, but they failed to maintain a recognizable class formation for long,
and they did not emerge clearly as a class in either twentieth-century com-
munity studies or from national poll data.
The evidence from our other three societies gives little reason therefore
to think that entrepreneurs and manufacturers were great class builders,
and since the rival focus of middle class aspiration and affiliation offered by
the professions was so much better organized in England than in any of
these societies, there seems little reason to think entrepreneurs were any
more successful as class builders in England. In the nature of their role,
entrepreneurs are rather ill-equipped for the task of creating class distinc-
tions. They are themselves often socially mobile, and their careers do not
begin with an extended status socialization like that of professionals,
indeed are more likely to involve an extended period of status humiliation
as they struggle to get their business under way. Nor are they inclined to
uphold any given division of labour and the status distinctions that accom-
pany it. On the contrary, they are more likely to want to rearrange both at
will. And they are not natural joiners. Like cats, they are difficult to herd.
Although they sometimes formed or joined trade associations, in England
such associations were often competitive, short-lived, and never received
the charters or state recognition or public respect of professional bodies.98
The Federation of British Industries was not formed until World War I, and
prompted largely by the government’s wish to have a means of com-
munication with, and control over, industry to prosecute the war more
effectively. By contrast, professionals seemed to have had little difficulty in
forming permanent and united national associations, and their headquarters
remain among the lesser architectural landmarks of the capital.
If entrepreneurs and manufacturers had taken the lead in forming the
English middle class, it is reasonable to suppose that public schools, to
which the more successful of them sent their sons, would have responded
to their concerns and interests instead of treating them with contempt. It is
also reasonable to expect that the middle class they supposedly led would
have elected them as their political representatives, and that they would
have been well-represented in the political elite that displaced the aristo-
cracy. In the event, professionals outnumbered entrepreneurs or manu-
facturers by more than three to one.99 Far from forming or leading their
own distinctive class, English entrepreneurs tended to attach themselves to
other classes, most often one suspects, to the professionally-dominated
middle class, if they could. A few of the most successful were assimilated
into the aristocracy, but they only illustrate the main point: the absence of
any competing, attractive entrepreneurial class formation or identity.
In England, entrepreneurs may be said to have made two important con-
tributions to the formation of the middle class, both being aspects of the
‘creative destruction’ for which they are famed. Their destructive contri-
bution was to undermine, and eventually destroy, the very first corporate
institutions of the middle class, that is the guilds and companies which had
organized and regulated the activities of their merchant and handicraft pre-
decessors. For the middle class, the conflict with Charles II and James II
that preceded the Glorious Revolution centred on the city of London and
its companies, rather than on the bodies of organized professionals who
were, for the most part, still peripheral players. As industrialization pro-
ceeded, entrepreneurs ignored and undermined the regulatory functions of
the city companies, leaving them as mere honorific bodies, while the pro-
liferating corporate institutions of professionals thrived and extended their
regulatory authority right across the country, and far surpassed either the
guilds or their trade association successors in social visibility and national
significance. Entrepreneurs’ second contribution to the formation of the
middle class was to organize the firms and industries, and generate the
income and wealth on which the livelihoods and growth of the new
professions, engineers, accountants, solicitors and architects and others,
depended. In short, one might say entrepreneurs destroyed the original
base of middle class organization, and provided the economic basis which
enabled professionals to create a new one.
To appreciate professionals’ contribution to class formation one has to
look beyond intermittent workplace confrontations, important as they may
be for the formation of the working class, and observe how class distinc-
tions are respected in routine and peaceful settings, and accepted ‘as norms
of everyday life’. In this process of normalizing or routinizing and national-
izing class distinctions, professionals seem rather better equipped than entre-
preneurs and employers. They can be seen, first of all, to have taken steps
that contribute to class barriers: by imposing and enforcing their rules of
admission and training, by socializing newcomers to accept invidious dis-
tinctions between themselves and other occupations, and by cultivating
the manners, demeanour, and speech that should be used with their clients.
Moreover, they have collectively enforced divisions of labour that separated
them from their supposed inferiors. There are some, rather limited, equi-
valents to these processes among entrepreneurs and manufacturers. They
might, for instance, be held responsible for institutionalizing the distinc-
tion between non-manual and manual workers, though trade unions have
often rendered powerful assistance in this respect. As a rule, however, they
seem to have been more inclined to create their own distinctive company
cultures, but these seldom survived their founders, or at any rate their firms.
None of the firms that created the industrial revolution have survived. By
contrast all the professional associations that were formed before or during
it have done so, and have been able to reproduce over generations many of
the rules, values and distinctions of their founders.
The evidence about the role of organized professions in normalizing and
nationalizing class distinctions is, it must be said, entirely circumstantial.
Their reputation as bystanders in class conflicts has meant that they seldom
receive much attention in studies explicitly concerned with class formation,
so there is no compelling direct testimony. Now and then, however, they
emerge from historical studies as overlooked suspects. One example is
Trainor’s analysis of the exercise of authority by the Black Country elite
during the horrors of early industrialization. He first identified ‘a resilient
landed aristocracy’, with national affiliations, who tended ‘to disdain pro-
vincial businessmen, however successful they might be.’ Simply on the
grounds of their great wealth, he thought a handful of the most successful
industrialists should be placed at the top of the local status hierarchy, and
lesser ones were also influential, but even then, at what one imagines must
have been the high point of entrepreneurial influence, and before the mass
mobilization of professionals had even begun, many of the leading roles in
the administration of justice, local government, religious and educational
institutions and voluntary associations of all kinds were taken by profes-
sionals, especially by doctors, solicitors and clergymen.100 Who, one wonders,
did more to define the Black Country’s middle class? The handful of suc-
cessful industrialists who sat at the top of the local status hierarchy or
those who organized and ran civil society?
One reason that contemporary evidence to confirm or refute the argu-
ment is not easy to find is that the normal sociological methods of measuring
class differences do not pick up class-structured or class-ridden interactions
at the workplace and the pub, in shops, schools, hospitals, courts, sports
grounds and other settings. They require hard quantifiable data like mea-
sures of income or other material inequalities, but these tell us nothing
about relationships. Ordinally-arranged hierarchies of occupational pres-
tige, the basis of studies of mobility between classes do not allow the inves-
tigator to discover how members of any one occupation might behave
towards, their ‘neighbours’ on the scale. Even if they did, it would hardly
be relevant since the ‘neighbours’ are only there because of the pooled
responses of randomly-selected informants.
Occasionally, however, observers, entirely ignorant of proper sociological
methodologies, have wandered about talking to people, collecting evidence
of everyday life. They have brought back disgracefully unreliable ‘soft’
evidence about what they have seen and heard. Orwell, of course, was one
offender. Hoggart was another and one of the worst. In the mid-fifties,
he provided one of the softest ever descriptions of the working class. He
tried to bring to life the way members of the working class saw those above
them, to convey how they themselves portrayed the division they com-
monly drew between ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. ‘Them’, Hoggart concluded, were the
‘shadowy but numerous and powerful group’ who were ‘affecting their lives
at almost every point.’ They were ‘bosses’ and ‘public officials’. His working
class informants gave him more specific details. They were, they told him,
‘the people at the top’, the ‘higher ups’, the ‘people who give you your
dole, call you up, tell you to go to war, fine you, made you split the family
in the thirties to avoid a reduction in the Means Test allowance…never tell
yer owt (e.g. about a relative in hospital), clap yer in clink…summons
yer….treat yer like muck.’ When, in other words, his informants gave details
of ‘Them’, they referred exclusively to professionals or semi-professionals,
doctors, clergymen, policemen, civil servants, or local authority employees, to
teachers, school attendance men, ‘the Corporation’ and the ‘local bench’.101
Entrepreneurs and employers did not rate a mention.
The working class inherits and re-invests its social capital
E.P. Thompson traced the making of the English working class by docu-
menting workers’ cries of anguish and protest during the early stages of
industrialization, by sharing their pain. However, we wish to identify the
institutional and organizational structures that reminded them of their
common plight, distinguished them from other classes, and were the basis
of their class sentiments and actions over many generations. To do this, it
is clear that we will have to go back much further than Thompson.102 We
must in fact begin not long after the bar established its corporate institu-
tions, for it was then that groups of journeymen who could never hope to
become masters began to form their own societies, and defend their own
distinctive collective interests. One may infer their existence from accounts
of the disputes in the cloth trade between 1350 and 1362 which, Lloyd
observed, ‘are closely analogous to modern strikes’, from various pieces of
legislation, like that of 1360–61, against ‘Alliances and Covines, and all
Congregations, Chapters, Ordinances and Oaths of masons and carpenters’,
that of 1425 against the ‘yearly Congregations and Confederacies made by
the masons in their general chapters and assemblies.’, and that of 1549,
which noted that ‘….artificers, handicraftsmen, and labourers have made
confederacies and promises, and have sworn mutual oaths, not only that
they should not meddle with one another’s work, and perform and finish
that another hath begun, but also to constitute and appoint how much
work they shall do in a day, and what hours and times they shall work,
contrary to the laws and statutes of this realm.’103
Although these lesser ‘confederacies’ do not have records comparable
to those of their masters, there is fair amount of direct evidence of inde-
pendent organization among journeymen in London companies, among
cordwainers in 1387, and of a ‘fraternity’ of the yeomanry (or journeymen)
of the saddlers in 1396. In 1415 journeymen tailors were ‘living apart by
themselves in companies … and were in the habit of assembling in great
numbers, and making conventicles in divers places beating, wounding and
ill-treating persons and even assaulted a master of the craft.’104 Two cen-
turies later, in 1613, London tailors de facto constituted two companies,
one inside the other; the chartered company of the City, and an informal
company of the yeomen which had its own ‘treasury clerks, bedel, bene-
factions and alms’, held its own church services, and celebrated its own
holidays. A separate organization of London blacksmiths was reported in
1434, and this had become recognized and accepted by their masters by
end of the century. In 1597 journeymen in the Curriers’ Company com-
plained to the Lord Mayor that they had been deprived of their role in
selecting wardens. After due consideration, the Lord Mayor decided that
they were entitled to elect a junior warden. In 1613, the ‘commonalty’ of
the Joiners’ Company brought a lawsuit to recover what they claimed had
originally been their right, that of electing assistants, masters and wardens,
that is the governing officers of the Company. They were unsuccessful.105
In 1616, the yeomanry of the Clothworkers similarly sought to extend the
suffrage of the Court of Assistants of their Company. They also failed.
Thus the beginnings of working class organization are to be found inside
the guilds and companies of London, and originally united small masters
along with journeymen and apprentices. Unwin observed that there was
‘scarcely a company whose history has been fully investigated in which
such an organization has failed to be discovered.’106 Some companies
appeared to have tolerated these ‘lesser companies’, while others sought
to suppress them altogether, though in the nature of things, they were
difficult either to control or suppress, since the working lives, as well as
the corporate activities of the guilds, continuously brought small masters,
journeymen and apprentices together. In form, these lesser companies were
replicas, more democratic replicas, of the company as a whole, and their
protests had two main goals, first, to force their masters to uphold the rules
of their trade more effectively, and second, to recapture the original demo-
cracy of the guild, which their masters had somehow – the yeomanry
seldom explained exactly how – subverted.107 Their efforts, as we have
already noticed, were never successful, since the Lord Mayor and Parliament
always sided with their masters. The original equality of the guild was there-
fore never to be restored, not by law at least, but the collective memory and
idealization of it was locked in the minds of the ‘yeomanry’ or ‘commonalty’
of the companies. Intermittently, it was burnished bright, and inspired more
vain protests, but it was never forgotten and was to have enduring con-
sequences for the making of the English working class.
Unwin referred to these yeomanry organizations as ‘secession’ movements,
but secession was obviously their last resort. They were, in fact, highly
ambivalent towards their own companies, at times organizing against their
masters, but on other occasions joining with them in defense of the com-
panies’ interests, especially in their spirited, and sometimes violent, protests
to uphold their status relative to other companies.108 Their ambivalence
emerges strongly in accounts of the protests that ricocheted from one City
of London company to another during the Puritan Revolution.109 No doubt
revolutionary events triggered these protests, but their demands, like those
of the parliamentary leaders, were entirely traditional. A number of them
demanded the removal from their governing bodies of ‘foreigners’, meaning
those who had not ‘served their time’. Such men were not, in their view,
their ‘legitimate’ masters, and did not, therefore, properly belong on the
governing body of their trade. Purged of these ‘foreigners’, the protesters
hoped that the remainder, their legitimate masters, would defend the trade
more conscientiously and vigorously than they had in the past, by searches,
fines and prosecutions of trespassers. They also demanded that the com-
panies should return to their original democratic constitutions. The journey-
men weavers’ pointed out that the Weavers’ Company charter was granted
‘not to so many particular men but to the whole society’, and that ‘what-
soever any person or persons were afterward invested with power under it
must of necessity be by the consent, election and approbation of the whole
body.’ In this, quite exceptional, instance, Parliament came to the angry
journeymen’s support, and authorized them to elect 140 representatives to
act for the whole body.110 Since most of these protests occurred during the
uncertain political context between Charles’ surrender to the Scots and his
execution in 1649, and since they were more or less simultaneous, they
were rather more threatening to their masters than the earlier ones. In the
long run, however, they were no more successful. No company purged ‘for-
eigners’ from its governing body, and no company, not even the Weavers,
became any more democratic than it had been before.
Eventually, the journeymen and apprentices, along with the smaller masters,
formed independent associations, though seldom, as far as we know, by
formal secession as an organized intact group. Lloyd’s account of the cutlery
trades in Sheffield is one of the few cases which allows us to follow the
transformation from lesser company within a chartered company first to a
trade society or trade union which later fragmented into a dozen or more
unions of specific trades.111 His narrative began with the first corporate
organization of the trade, in London in 1298, when there was a ‘fully organ-
ized body of craftsmen supervising and controlling the trade by means of
regular gild machinery’, with annually elected officers who enforced a
seven-year apprenticeship and deputized ‘searchers’ of premises to find
‘illegal’ goods. A separate organization of journeymen seems to have appeared
by 1380 since the ordinances of the London Cutlers then made ‘definite
provision … for the control of a distinct class of journeymen.’ In 1415, the
company obtained its first charter of incorporation, which was inter-
mittently renewed and amended. It must have been one of those com-
panies served with a writ of quo warranto in 1684, because its charter was
reissued in 1689, so the Cutlers’ Company was among the direct beneficiaries
of the Glorious Revolution.112
Thereafter, the cutlery trade in London entered into a long period of
decline, though apprentices were still bound and enrolled by the Company
as late as 1876–1880. In Sheffield, however, cutlery grew into a major
industry. A corporate organization in the city had been recorded in 1565,
when an ordinance, sanctioned by the Earl of Shrewsbury, lord of the manor,
regulated the trade ‘according to the ancient customes and ordinances’. In
1624, it obtained a charter by an act of incorporation from Parliament. This
recognized ‘one body politic, perpetual and incorporate of one Master, two
Wardens, six Searchers and twenty-four Assistants and Commonalty of the
said company of cutlers.’ It also allowed officers to appoint their successors,
and thereby excluded the commonalty from a share in the government.113
Company records were not inclined to record the complaints of the com-
monalty, but they are known to have protested in 1711 about the master’s
misuse of the Company’s funds which, they said, were not being devoted
to ‘the relief and benefit of the poor of the said Corporation’. Thereafter
they intermittently resisted fines imposed on them. Some of them must
have participated in the formation of journeymen societies that appeared
in the city over the subsequent decades, since these included a Filesmiths’
Society 1721, a Cutlers’ Benefit Society in 1732, a Grinders’ Society 1748,
and dozens of friendly societies.114 In 1785 freemen of the Company were
‘definitely organized’. Their Freemen’s Committee was, Lloyd observed, ‘an
association within the company, yet distinct from it … an anticipation of a
trade union organization, … which … may be compared with the journey-
men clubs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries…’115 It held regular
monthly meetings, during which its members continually complained of
the Company’s failure to regulate apprenticeship. In 1789, the Committee
demanded to see the Company’s accounts, and collected subscriptions
from its members so that it might take action in the Court of King’s Bench,
and promote a bill in Parliament to reform and democratize the Company.
Their suit and their bill both failed, and before they could propose another
bill, they were persuaded to accept arbitration. This allowed them to nom-
inate candidates for half of the governing body, from which the Masters
would then select half as their successors. This evidently had little effect on
the Company policies, since the complaints of its failure to protect its freemen
against those who had not ‘served their time’ continued in subsequent years.
Organized protest groups then appeared among particular trades under
the jurisdiction of the Company, among scissors-grinders in 1790, spring-
knife cutlers in 1796, and saw-smiths in 1797. Lloyd noted that ‘the model’
these trades ‘chose in drawing up their rules appears to have been the con-
stitution of the Cutlers’ Company itself’, since they adopted the titles of
Masters and Wardens, imposed ‘fines’ on those who refused to take office,
and prominently reproduced the Company’s rules of apprenticeship.116 By
the end of the eighteenth century, these freemen seem to have became part
of a larger labour or class movement, for in their legal and parliamentary
campaigns against their masters who controlled the Cutlers’ Company they
were offered support by the buttonmakers, masons and tailors of Sheffield,
by some of the 52 friendly societies then in existence in the city, as well as
by ‘friends’ in Manchester, whose help they gratefully acknowledged. This
campaign provoked their masters to respond in kind, and make a class-like
appeal ‘to the gentlemen, clergy, merchants and principal inhabitants’ of
the city.117 The same wider class alignments reappeared during the national
campaign of skilled workers against the repeal of the Statute of Artificers in
1814, when their employers again briefly organized some 400 merchants
and master manufacturers into the Sheffield Manufacturers and Mercantile
Union, which built up a war chest to enabled it to prosecute, and to obtain
the imprisonment, of a number of members of trade societies.118 The workers’
responded by organizing the Sheffield Mechanical Trades Association in
1822, which sought, Lloyd observed, ‘not merely to serve the purposes of a
trade union, but also to usurp in large measure the functions of a reorganized
and democratized Cutlers’ Company.’119 In 1836 some 20 trades sent repre-
sentatives to a Committee of the Associated Trades, which sought ‘the
establishment and perpetuation of a more intimate connection between all
branches of the operative classes.’
These wider class forms of organization did not, however, lessen their
concern for their own trade interests. Far from it. In subsequent decades,
some of the trade societies felt driven to uphold their apprenticeship rules
in their own way, either by ‘rattening’, that is by removing or destroying
the tools and appliances of offending masters and workers, and by violent
attacks on their homes and persons, two of which proved fatal. These
Sheffield ‘outrages’, as they came to be called were among the most violent
episodes in the entire history of organized labour in Britain. Publicly, all
the trade societies condemned them, but a thorough government commis-
sion of inquiry in 1867, benefiting from informants and confessions, finally
decided that of some 60 separate trade societies in the city, 12 had been
party to them.120 The remaining 48 survived, and went on to form part of
Sheffield’s strong and well-organized modern labour movement.
There are only a few other trades, such as Nottinghamshire framework

knitters, Lancashire calico printers, and London compositors, whose unions
can be traced with some confidence from associations of journeymen
formed inside London guilds or companies.121 In most cases there is no
documentary record of any direct continuity, and one may only observe
how journeymen reproduced the organizations of their fellows in other
cities, or copied those of other trades, an imitative process not unlike that
later found among professionals, though on a far wider scale.
Rule focused on three trades: tailors, hatters and woollen weavers and
combers, though he noted that ‘comparable levels of organization are well
documented for many other trades.’122 None of the three kept written
records. His account is therefore necessarily episodic and intermittent and
rests largely on the complaints of their employers. It is, however, reason-
able to infer that their organizations were both continuous and national.
One account from 1700 refers to five clubs of London journeymen tailors
which had formed a central union around ‘houses of call’, usually inns,
taverns and pubs, which served as labour exchanges. These clubs appear
again in a dispute in 1720–1721, which ended with Parliament prohibiting
combinations of tailors in London and Westminster, and fixing their wages
and hours. Nevertheless, they re-emerged in labour disputes in 1744–1745,
and yet again in 1752. In 1756 we know from John Fielding that 40 of the
tailors’ box clubs formed a ‘House of Representatives’, with an executive
‘Grand Committee for the Management of the Town’, against which the
‘master taylors … have ever been defeated … in some measure due to the
infidelity of the masters themselves to each other, some of whom … have
collected together with some of the journeymen and complied with their
exorbitant demands.’ In 1764, according to masters’ complaints to Parlia-
ment, journeymen tailors had formed ‘a kind of republic’, holding meetings
at 42 ‘houses of call’ to appoint delegates to the ‘Grand Committee’ which
‘made rules and orders for the direction of the masters and the whole body
of journeymen tailors.’123 They emerged again in various disputes and pro-
secutions in the 1760s and 1770s, and then in 1824, Francis Place referred to
their ‘perfect and perpetual combination’, and the unlimited confidence they
place in the five executive delegates called the ‘Town’. They never discuss ‘the
propriety of a strike’ for that would risk prosecution, but simply ‘strike when
bid.’ There are intermittent glimpses of similar forms of organization among
journeymen tailors in Birmingham, Cambridge and Liverpool.
Journeymen hatters had ‘a history of combination at least as long as that
of the tailors.’124 Their ‘congress’ made ‘by-laws, extracted fines and pre-
vented many masters from taking apprentices beyond a prescribed limit.’
The authority of their congress evidently extended to Manchester since in
1775 employers there said they would not employ hatters who would not
declare their intention not to obey ‘any pretended laws made by a Congress,
Committee or any other Combination of piece-makers’. Employers sought
parliamentary support to remove the restriction on the number of appren-

tices they could take, but Parliament also received counter-petitions from
journeymen across the country. It sided, inevitably, with the employers,
but journeymen hatters were nonetheless able ‘in most times’ to ensure an
effective de facto limitation on the number of apprentices by refusing to
work with those who they did not regard as ‘fair’ workmen. They contin-
ued their strikes right through the quarter-century of the Combination
Laws (1799–1824), usually over the same issue of what they called ‘foul’
men, that is, those who had not served an apprenticeship in accordance
with ‘the bye laws of the journeymen.’
Rule went on to provide evidence of hatters’ organization in four other
towns, and then about wool-combers. Those in Yorkshire in the mid-
eighteenth century were said by a contemporary to have formed them-
selves into a sort of corporation ‘though without a charter’, which was
powerful enough to ‘give laws to their masters and to themselves’, adding
that they ‘are becoming one society throughout the kingdom.’125 All this
evidence about organization among working men from the thirteenth
century on through to the eighteenth century did not impress two of the
most respected historians of the trade unions and of the working class,
Sidney and Beatrice Webb. They played down this oral, metastatic, cultural
continuity with the guilds, as did E.P. Thompson, though to a lesser degree.
The Webbs would not accept sporadic spontaneous and ‘ephemeral com-
binations against their social superiors’, or repeated strikes, as evidence of a
trade union, and insisted on documented histories of continuous asso-
ciation.126 It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this stringent legalistic
requirement was the result of a theoretical or ideological determination to
portray trade unions and the working class as modern phenomena, as pro-
ducts of the capitalist mode of production. In so doing these great scholars
of the working class obscured rather than illuminated the distinctive char-
acteristics of the English working class, for in terms of their priorities and
tactics, institutions, as well as their language, behaviour and collective insti-
tutions, the case that von Brentano made for continuity with yeomanry
and journeymen societies within the guilds is an overwhelming one.127
It has been persuasively vindicated by later research.128 It is demonstrated
by the enduring primacy of trade protection functions, by the methods of
trade unions, and in the vocabulary of trade unions (shop stewards, blacklegs,
brothers etc). It is visibly evident in the practice of embroidering heraldic
banners that English unions carried, and often still carry, before them in
public demonstrations. This was a guild practice and many of these banners
incorporated the symbols of the guilds and companies from which the jour-
neymen society which was the forerunner of the union had emerged.129 With-
out recognizing this cultural continuity from guild to union, it is impossible
to identify the distinctive character and behaviour of England’s trade unions –
or that of its working class.
When, why and how these two classes parted company
The early formation of the English middle and working classes therefore
have much in common. The organizational roots of both are to be found in
medieval corporate institutions and long preceded industrialization. In the
case of the middle class, the point can hardly be disputed, since the ancient
corporate institutions of barristers and physicians still survive, their his-
tories are continuously documented, and it is not difficult to show that
their practice-based training, their self-government, their protected juris-
diction and their corporate pride and honour, often served as models for
subsequent professions. In the case of trade unions, the case for continuity
has, as we have just seen, been disputed, since there is seldom a continuous
documentary record. However, the circumstantial evidence provided by the
behaviour of tradesmen of all kinds right through the eighteenth century is
strong, and in a moment we will show that when some of these old trades
or spin-offs from them, were employed in new industrial settings, they con-
tinued to behave in a similar manner, and were then imitated by a host
of newly-invented trades in newly-invented industries. Before we do so,
however, we must note how and why, despite their similar point of origin,
similar concerns and similar associational forms, the non-manual and manual
workers did not develop along parallel paths as mirror images of one another,
but diverged, and along with them the middle and working classes of which
they were the organized cores.
The main reason was that non-manual occupations required intellectual
rather than financial capital. Greater numbers of them could therefore remain
self-employed, and since many of their members were already voters, they
could expect, once they were appropriately organized, to be recognized by
the state, and to be granted powers of collective self-government. By con-
trast, the more numerous manual occupations increasingly depended on
those who had invested in physical capital, and were therefore likely to be
employees throughout their working lives. Since few of them were voters,
they could hardly, like professionals, count members of parliament among
their clients, and they had no direct relationship with the state, while their
employers often did. It was therefore inevitable, even without the political
threat that governments sometimes thought journeymen associations and
trade societies posed, that the state would be reluctant to offer journeymen
and trade societies the same kind of recognition and protection that it
offered to emerging professional bodies, and that professions and skilled
workers would therefore go their separate ways.
It is possible to identify the historical moment when they parted company
with some precision. Between the summers of 1812 and 1814, groups of
skilled workers organized the national campaign to obtain the kind of
statutory recognition of their trade rights that, in a general way, they had
been granted by the Statute of Artificers of 1563, and that some professions
had obtained in more precise terms in their charters. As they organized

their campaign, craftsmen already acknowledged that they were different
from the professions, since they approached the state collectively, as an
alliance of trades, whereas the professions that had formed by this time,
such as the former members of the City of London’s barber-surgeons, had
asked for recognition and protection as a single occupation. Craftsmen’s
demands were also more basic than those of the professions, and focused
on the one institution that they knew was the foundation of both their
self-government and the regulation of their trades – apprenticeship.
Their campaign had really begun some years before 1812, as journeymen
societies in many parts of the country, including the Sheffield cutlers men-
tioned above and those in London companies that were still closely identified
with a craft, had tried to enforce in the courts the seven-year apprenticeship
rule included in the Statute of Artificers. Some kind of inter-trade association,
about which no details survive, had financed and brought at least 19 separate
legal actions over the three years 1809 to 1812.130 These related to 13 different
trades, and the tradesmen who brought the actions lost 12 of them. As a result
of these defeats, some journeymen, calling themselves ‘the mechanics of the
metropolis’, decided during the summer of 1812 that it would be pointless to
continue their legal actions without first obtaining parliamentary reinforce-
ment or re-enactment of the Statute. Since the Combination Laws were still in
force, they took counsel’s advice on the precise legal limits of the kind of cam-
paign they could conduct. They then established a representative body, con-
sisting of two men from every trade in London, which regularly assembled
through the autumn of 1812 and early months of 1813, to prepare a petition
to Parliament, and to draft a proposed bill. By April 1813, they had collected
32,000 signatures, more than half of which came from outside London, which
supports other evidence that they were already linked with provincial trade
societies with similar concerns and had established the rudiments of a national
organization.
After the presentation of their petition, a parliamentary select committee
was appointed, which heard much evidence to support their argument,
including the fact that H.M. dockyards never allowed any workman to be
employed there without having properly served his apprenticeship. But they
also received counter-petitions, not as it happens from wealthy entrepreneurs
anxious to reorganize their enterprises with unskilled unapprenticed labour,
but more often from poor masters or workmen, such as one from Plymouth
which pleaded that he had been orphaned, and some from impoverished
families saying that it was only their poverty that had prevented them serving
an apprenticeship. Another, from fellmongers of Bermondsey, pointed out
that their businesses could only survive by employing ‘blacklegs’.
The Select Committee barely kept a quorum and declined to produce a
report, which indicated that legislation would not, as the trade societies seem
to have hoped, immediately follow. Moreover, the first sign of organized
opposition from employers emerged shortly afterwards when a meeting of

some 50 manufacturers, led by a barrister MP, set up a body calling itself,
‘Associated Manufacturers for repealing the 5th Elizabeth’. Given the legis-
lative delay, and the sudden, belated appearance of this organized oppo-
sition, the journeymen decided to make their own organization permanent
and national, with a subscription of tuppence per month to fund legal counsel.
The new national association was also seen as a ‘means of keeping up the
spirit of mechanics, by having an opportunity of meeting monthly, for the
attainment of an object which is strictly legal.’131
They then increased their lobbying of MPs, both in their constituencies
across the country and at Westminster, and launched a campaign of plac-
ards, posters and newspaper advertisements to win public support. Their
own petition grew to 300,000 signatures, but there were also dozens of sep-
arate petitions from many other towns and trades, including 23 from the
London trades alone. These petitions included a number from masters and
employers, including one from the ‘Directors of the Chamber of Manufactures
and Commerce of Birmingham’, because many employers in that city were
persuaded that the craftsmen’s cause was a just one. However, the pro-
ponents of total repeal astutely neutralized this potentially powerful sup-
port for the trade societies’ cause, by rushing to assure the chartered
corporations of London and of other cities, that their bill for repeal would
not infringe their corporate privileges in the least.
This journeymen’s campaign for statutory recognition of their appren-
ticeship rules was the first national organization and mobilization of work-
ingmen in Britain, and indeed in the world. It is one of the great episodes
in the history of the working class, and of British democracy, since it also
embraced Scottish workers, and was the forerunner of many other national
movements.132 And it was squarely based on a national network of trade
societies. Its purpose, clearly, was the defense of trade interests, and it
looked back to 1563 or even earlier, since the Elizabethan statute was itself
merely a codification of practice over the preceding centuries. Perhaps because
it looked backwards, preceded large-scale industrialization, was scrupulously
legal, non-violent and had no martyrs, and took place while the sup-
posedly ‘crushing’ Combination Laws were still in effect, it is slightly
inconvenient for histories of the working class, most of which therefore
ignore it completely.133
Although in terms of national organization and mass support, there was
really no comparison between the two sides, the proponents of repeal none-
theless carried the day, and on July 18th 1814 the Elizabethan statute was
repealed. Derry plausibly suggested that the decisive factor was the ability
of the ‘promoters of repeal … to use the bogey of workingmen’s combina-
tions to rally all forces to their side’. Employers who favoured repeal argued
that apprenticeship was ‘… a never-ceasing motive to all denominations of
journeymen to congregate in dangerous bodies and engender injurious
measures to the peace and prosperity of the country.’ The main spokesman
of repeal claimed that ‘the continuance of the law was affording a colour
for the most dangerous combinations: Nothing would so much tend to
unnerve them, as repealing these restrictions’.134 This line of argument
might well have been strengthened by the national campaign that skilled
workers had organized, since it provided stunning confirmation that there
was some substance behind the bogey.
Repeal of the Elizabethan statute meant that skilled trades were not to be
granted any statutory support comparable to that of the professions, and it
is for this reason that their campaign between 1812–1814 may be deemed a
parting of the ways between professionals and skilled workers, and indeed
between the middle and working classes. After this rebuff, skilled workers
never sought or expected support or protection from the state or the law,
and only hoped to be left alone. Over time, this is exactly what happened.
In 1824 the Combination Laws were repealed, though the common law
offences of conspiracy and restraint of trade left the trade societies on
uncertain legal ground and enabled employers to threaten their existence,
until this possibility was definitively removed by the Trade Union Act of
1871. Dobson identified 29 cases over the 80 years between 1720 and 1800,
but no one appears to have counted how many legal actions were brought
over the years up to 1871, and how many unions were in fact threatened,
or destroyed, by them.135 Since they do not appear to have seriously inter-
rupted labour organization in the eighteenth century, it seems unlikely
that they had a serious impact during the nineteenth. National unions of
skilled workers, and their national federation, the Trades Union Congress,
were both formed while this threat still hung over them. Before continuing
this part of the story of the formation of the working class, however, we
had best consider how well they were able to defend their rights in their
workplaces without any protection from the law.
Manual workers establish self-regulation in their workplaces
Empirical research, from a great range of industries, from the nineteenth

century through to contemporary times, demonstrates that they and their
successors had a considerable measure of success. Behagg’s evidence
from various workplaces in the first half of the nineteenth century, showed
that while independent handicraft producers were fast disappearing, many
of the workers employed in the new factories continued to think and
behave like them.136 They claimed that ‘they “owned” (or “co-owned”) the
product…and this gave them the right to control their time’, and even
the workplace itself. In their view, ‘legitimate’ and ‘honourable’ employers
were those who ‘would simply initiate the process of production and
market the finished goods’, and accept that ‘what came between, the nature
and pace of work, determining how and when an article was made, was
properly the province of labour.’137 They claimed, in other words, that there
should be no managerial control or supervision whatever over the pro-
duction process itself, as if they were self-employed sub-contractors, or one
might say, members of self-governing professions.
Behagg then showed that the actual hours spent at work, and the actual
amount of work performed, were often at the discretion of the workers
themselves. For instance, a Leicester wool comber, interviewed in 1850,
said that ‘we work what hours we please, but the shop is open for us from
five in the morning until nine at night … The pot is never extinguished
from Sunday to Sunday.’ London cooperages similarly remained open from
3 a.m. to 9 p.m., which obviously made it difficult for any employer to
supervise production. In Kidderminster, ‘carpet weavers frequently carried
their master’s keys, so that they could open and close the shop as they
began and finished.’ According to one pottery worker, employers in his
industry kept a very low profile. ‘One of them was rarely seen at work. The
other used to come about ten o’clock in the morning in a carriage and pair,
and stay half an hour or an hour. I never saw him in a workshop.’ If their
employer tried to exercise close supervision, one worker in a Birmingham
rule shop reported, they thwarted his attempts by ‘shying at him rotten
potatoes, stale bread and …on occasions things of a worse description.’
Confounding all one’s expectations, and much academic commentary
besides, Behagg suggested that the movement from traditional outwork to
factory production sometimes involved a loss of control over the pro-
duction process for the employer. Among other cases, he cited one Derby
employer who, in 1845, had abandoned his factory, reverted to a decentral-
ized putting-out form of production by hiring out some 4,000 stocking
frames, explaining that in the large shops ‘the hands did more what they
liked, they would not do this, nor would they do that; they would raise a
quibble on every alteration made, and we had more frequent turn-outs
(strikes) through it.’
Withdrawal from factory production altogether was, one may reasonably
assume, rather exceptional, but observers of a great many other workplaces
leave no doubt that English workers asserted a considerable degree of self-
government at the point of production. Lloyd thought that the Sheffield
cutlery trades were so well-organized that their employers had no choice
but to accept the way they wished to work, and that ‘during the first half of
the nineteenth century many of the unions were so conscious of their
strength that they were often dictatorial towards their masters’. In his view,
this was because employers ‘possessed little of that power of voluntary cohe-
sion and co-operation which was the secret of the trade union’s influence.’138
Cotton textile mills are the emblematic workplace of the horrors of the
industrial revolution, and its workers often presented as the classic example
of a semi-skilled or unskilled and undifferentiated proletariat. However, with
numerous examples, Turner documented the emergence and proliferation of a
strong occupational consciousness amongst them, and a high degree of

self-regulation. One of his examples, calico printers, was probably the result
of migration by journeymen of the City of London company of calico
printers. Most of the others were newly-invented trades. He carefully traced
how one of them, so-called ‘strippers and grinders’, raised themselves over
several generations from the status of unskilled workers to that of skilled
craftsmen, by establishing apprenticeship requirements and by defining
their jurisdiction, and came to be recognized as skilled by their employers
and their fellow workers, even though the content of their work had not
changed a jot.139
Vichniac compared the British and French iron and steel industries from
the 1830s on, and found that, although the British was much the larger
and more advanced industry and served far larger markets, French employ-
ers first ‘found the independence implicit in sub-contracting impossible’
and ‘assumed greater control over hiring, training and promotion at an
earlier historical moment’ than their British counterparts. They also employed
engineers, supervisors and foremen to plan the labour process, to deter-
mine the pace of work, to monitor the quality of products, and to select
and train workers for promotion. In Britain, by contrast, skilled workers
remained in control of recruitment, training and promotion, were respon-
sible for organizing production, while their unions or friendly societies per-
formed the welfare functions assumed by French employers. Many of these
contrasting features had, she thought, ‘continued to the present, shaping
industrial relations in the 1970s and 1980s, in particular the more powerful
presence of British unions on the shopfloor.’140
Lorenz compared the degree of management control of work in the ship-
building industries of Britain and France between 1880–1930, where once
again the British firms were generally larger and supplying larger markets.
He found, however, that it was managers in the French yards who were first
actively engaged in planning the division of labour and ‘de-skilling’ trade
specialties. The biggest of them had imposed scientific management prior
to World War I. He characterized the French labour process as ‘flexibility
and co-ordination from above’, while the British yards used ‘indirect forms
of control based on the semi-autonomous work-group or squad.’ Since the
British skilled workers ‘had a working knowledge of each other’s respon-
sibilities’, each of them ‘could co-ordinate his own work in relation to that
of his squad partners without the need for higher level supervision or instruc-
tion.’ In Britain, ‘professional groups’, as he called them, meaning platers,
shipwrights, carpenters and the like, ‘engaged in corporate or sectional
struggles aimed at controlling the job content of their profession.’141
In his comparison, of two oil refineries in each country in 1970, Gallie
reported that in France, ‘management had kept a tighter grip over the control
process: more powers were reserved to the supervisors, disciplinary sanc-
tions were more severe.’ British management, by contrast, ‘had no powers
of control through the payment system, and its capacity to issue instruc-
tions…was hedged round by a series of constraints that had been originally
obtained through the organized power of the craft unions and had, to a
certain degree, become consolidated into the customs of the refinery.’142 A
similar contrast emerged from Dubois’ comparison of the divisions of labour
in the fibreglass, canning and chemical products industries in France and
England in the 1970s. In France, he noted, the employer was free to dis-
tribute work ‘as he chooses’, while in England, the ‘demarcation between
trades is very precise’, and upheld by the workers themselves. Production
workers in England did not, Dubois noticed, perform any maintenance
tasks, and the two kinds of worker had therefore to be subject to quite sep-
arate hierarchies of supervision. In other words, the management structures
of the British plants were themselves determined by the structure of the
trades, not as one might assume, the other way around.143
Volume car production assumed the same emblematic status for the
twentieth century as cotton textiles did for the nineteenth, and driven by
unrelenting technological requirements supposedly imposed harsh, stan-
dardized work relationships on de-skilled workers in every capitalist society.
A little classic of sociological analysis, written by a skilled worker in Coventry,
Dwight Rayton, showed that whatever may have been the case in other
capitalist societies, it was not like that in England.144 Ever since the earliest
days of industrialization, he pointed out, Coventry workers had been engaged
in ‘a continuous fight to civilise factory life … in the direct line of Coventry’s
old craft tradition.’ As a result, the city’s workers had ‘never been over-
whelmed by the sordid degradation of the early factory system’, and had
established ‘their group way’ in many of the city’s early industries, ‘ribbon
weaving, watchmaking, sewing machines, bicycles, motor cycles.’ He directly
experienced its continuation in the manufacture of cars, aeroplanes, aero
engines and machine tools, before during, and for some four decades after
World War II.
By his account, the practice of electing a ‘ganger’ had emerged in the late
1920s, and had become widespread when he went to work (‘we are not
having a boss’, as he put it). The ‘ganger’ was obliged to answer questions
in meal breaks (‘as in Parliament’) and could be sacked at any gang meeting.
Workplace rules rested on an ‘unwritten contract’ (‘as in the Common Law
kind of contract’) between the firm and the gang as an entity, usually of
20–30 men, though they could be much larger. They consisted of skilled
men, ‘though we made no distinction on degrees of skill.’145 Once the gang
was organized, ‘discipline was left to us … we ran the shop ourselves and
the “gaffer” (manager) stayed in the office.’ The gang took care of apprentices,
who also had their own gang, though they were simultaneously members of
those of skilled men, and ‘could at times, participate in gang meetings, but
without votes.’ A man was given ‘time to explain difficult jobs and complex
aircraft systems …to “his” apprentice’. In the factory producing bomber
aircraft in which he worked during World War II, this ‘gang’ system became
‘almost universal’, and was ‘transmitted to other aircraft plants, largely by
the men themselves, though it was sometimes imposed from above by “the
experts”’.
After the war, it spread to bus and tractor production, machine tools, and
even house-building in which, as a friend told him, ‘supervision became
negligible’ since the ‘men resisted hostile people in middle management.’
The gang’s responsibilities extended beyond the workplace, to include trans-
port to work and holiday arrangements, benevolent work for sick members
and a host of leisure and sports activities. The main threat to this worker
self-government, or ‘group way’ came towards the end of his working life
from ‘Americanized measured daywork systems’, which he and his mates
thought ‘take your freedom away from you … take your conscience from
you …’ Coventry men, he reported, ‘are fighting against the American
system’, which they saw as a new form of oppression. He did not record the
outcome of their struggle, but they might be said to have won – in a manner
of speaking – since volume car production under British management
disappeared from the city not long thereafter.
Fifteen years later, Rayton’s first-hand account received scholarly confirm-
ation in Lewchuk’s careful analysis of the emergence of the automobile
manufacturing industry in Britain.146 He repeatedly noticed how the entre-
preneurs and managers who created the industry were quite familiar with
Fordist managerial methods, but rejected them. In their place, they created
what he called a distinctive ‘British system of mass production’, in which
managerial control was ‘indirect’ and ‘incomplete’ and any ‘attempts to
alter authority relationships within the factory, to grant managers more
power and impose a new effort bargain, met with severe opposition’, mean-
ing strikes, which usually ended with managerial concessions.147 ‘British
capitalism’, Lewchuk concluded, ‘had adopted an institutional framework
within which, to a large extent, labour regulated itself.’148
Grunberg’s field research in two car manufacturing plants, one in France,
the other in Britain, owned by the same multinational company, making
the same car, in 1976, provided further corroboration of Rayton’s and of
Lewchuk’s analyses. Grunberg found that management in the French plant
‘enjoyed virtually uncontested control of the production process’, and had
‘complete freedom to determine man assignments and to move workers
from one post to another … the speed of the assembly line could be increased
at any time to recover losses caused by breakdowns.’149 In the British plant,
by contrast, ‘workers did not permit this to happen.’ While repairmen in
France not only carried out repairs but also assisted line operators, repair-
men in the English plant ‘would have none of this.’ English workers got
allowances for tea breaks, late starts and early finishes, while French workers
got none of these things. ‘Very simply’, he says, ‘the English spent less time
working’ than the French, ‘the work they did was at a slower pace’, and
they had ‘a far greater ability to influence the conditions of their work’,
than did the French.150 They were much more likely to challenge manage-
ment on working conditions, on discipline, on manning levels and the
pace of work. They were also far more likely to come out on strike, and
especially unofficial strikes in which only a handful of men were involved.
These averaged about two a day (my italics), while the ‘revolutionary pro-
letariat’ in the French plant had not had a single dispute since 1947. The
result was that the French plants was nearly 25% more productive, and
more importantly as far as Grunberg’s research aim was concerned, it also
had an accident rate sixty times greater. (The italics are his). He seems to
have thought that no one would believe him. From our point of view,
however, the key point is the marked contrast in the powers of workers, the
‘extraordinary strength of the workforce on the shop floor’ in England,
while in France management had ‘a free hand on the shop floor.’
We have now given evidence from more than 15 industries, most of it com-
parative. We might give more, but will close with a non-comparative study
from the late 1960s, which is a particularly illuminating example because
the researcher, Temperley, was able to observe the creation of occupational
identities, of a division of labour between them, and of self-governing insti-
tutions among unskilled workers, in what appears to be a most unpromis-
ing work setting. It is one with which every reader will be familiar: airport
baggage-handlers.151 The airport was newly-opened, and the handlers had
all been hired simply as ‘general hands’, but in just three months had
created three distinct occupational roles, those of porter, sorter and loader.
They had also institutionalized a centre of their communal life, which they
called the ‘bothy’, a billet or restroom, where they met, talked, drank tea,
relaxed and played cards. Over these same months, they replaced the indi-
vidual communication with managers with which they began by com-
munication through elected representatives, for each of their four shifts, and
then elected an overall representative for all three ‘occupations’ and all
shifts. On being elected, this overall representative resigned as ‘leading
hand’, and then approached both ‘the union for recognition as the general
hand shop steward and … the Ground Controller (who was the responsible
airport manager) to inform him of the new workshop arrangement.’152
Everything had taken place thus far, therefore, without the participation,
or even attention, of either union officials or managers. Subsequently, these
‘general hands’ went on to invent and enforce rules to cover various aspects
of their work. They eliminated favouritism in the distribution of overtime,
for example, by imposing a roster. They forcibly sanctioned a driver who
declined to participate in any loading or unloading work, (driving had not
been recognized as a distinct occupation in the division of labour they had
defined). They prevented porters pocketing large amounts of extra income
from passengers’ tips, so-called ‘bung money’, by persuading them to surrender
them to a common fund. These were then booked, banked, and distributed
equally to all the ‘general hands’ every month, wrapped in old newspaper.
Porters suspected of withholding tips were upended, to shake free from
their pockets any tips they might have ‘forgotten’. Temperley’s research ended
however, in a few months, so we do not know when or how, or if, this
episode of occupational self-regulation came to an end.
The evidence of the workplace relationships of English workers we have
reviewed is drawn from such diverse industries, with such varied techno-
logies, in such varied market conditions, and from such different times,
from the very beginning of manufacturing industry until the 1980s, that
we may reasonably conclude that we have identified one of the distinctive
and enduring characteristics of the English mode of production, namely,
self-governing occupational groups who insulated themselves from direct
managerial supervision. While skilled workers were usually the prime movers,
the unskilled, as we have just observed, often behaved in a similar manner.
There is a certain amount of aggregate cross-national data to support the
conclusion that the English ‘mode of production’ was distinctive. Labour
force data over time show, for instance, that far higher proportions of the
English labour force have been able to lay claim to the autonomy of the
skilled worker than either the American or the French. National statistics of
skill levels are rightfully treated warily because of the absence of any stan-
dardized notion of skill, but the content and level of skill is not here at
issue. The designation ‘skilled’ is simply taken as recording a customary
form of social differentiation recognized in the workplace of each country,
identifying those workers with a recognized occupational title who are
expected to work without close managerial supervision. Over every decade
where comparison is possible, industries in England and Wales have had a
higher proportion of skilled workers than either American or French. The
American ratio is known from 1900 when it was 2.3 unskilled workers to
1 skilled worker.153 The English and Welsh can only be given from 1930,
when it was 0.73 unskilled to every 1 skilled worker. Over time, the two
economies tended to converge. The American became more skilled, and the
ratio declined over nine decades to 1.3 to 1 in 1994 and 1.2 in 2001. The
English and Welsh meanwhile became relatively less skilled, and the ratio
increased over the seven decades for which we have evidence to reach 1.1
to 1 in 1991 so that English manufacturing industry’s distinctive reliance
on skilled workers had by then all but disappeared, though by that time
much of its manufacturing industry had also disappeared.154 Roughly com-
parable figures are available for France only since 1960, and they suggest
that the French manufacturing labour force more closely resembled the
American in this respect, declining from a ratio of 1.89 to 1 in 1960 (when
the American ratio was 1.7 to 1) to a ratio of 1.13 to 1 in 1987, compared to
the American ratio just stated, of 1.3 to 1 in 1994.155
Further convincing corroboration of a distinctive English mode of pro-
duction is provided by the categories in which official statistics, of both
earnings and strikes, are collected in Britain. Government statisticians do

not arbitrarily choose a method for collecting such data. Earnings statistics
are, as Marsden astutely observed, ‘a social fact’, and ‘strongly influenced
by the practice of firms and collective agreements.’ If they were not, they
would be difficult to collect, and they would remain unused. In Britain alone,
he observed ‘occupational categories prevail’, and reflect ‘the underlying
reality of occupations with strong identities.’156 Strike statistics are pre-
sented in exactly the same form, ‘occupational categories prevail’ and for
the same reason, because British employees routinely take industrial action
as members of a particular occupation, rather than as workers in a particular
plant or industry, or the workers of a particular employer, or as members of
a particular union.157
If we hope to explain the peculiarity of the English mode of production
revealed by these case studies and national data, it seems unlikely that we
could do so by reference to technological or market forces since it has been
documented in workplaces with diverse technologies, operating in all manner
of markets, and over long periods of time. Adam Smith’s image of the divi-
sion of labour as a rather automatic process limited only ‘by the extent of
the market’ will have to be discarded, since English workers have plainly
been better collectively organized to define and defend the division of labour
they preferred, regardless of the extent of the market. Attempts to explain the
differences between American and English manufacturing such as Habakkuk’s
argument that American firms were more likely to adopt labour-saving
inventions because of the shortage in the supply of skilled labour, or Broad-
berry’s thesis that differences in the organization of manufacturing firms in
the two societies stem from differences in their ‘initial factor endowments’
seem similarly unhelpful.158
Our best chance of understanding and explaining the peculiarities of
English workplace relationships is to refer back to ‘the power of voluntary
cohesion and cooperation’ that Lloyd noticed among the cutlery trades or
to the ‘impulse of associate’ that Turner documented among cotton textile
workers.159 Once we do this, we can hardly fail to notice that non-manual,
self-employed occupations that became professions had similar ‘powers’
and ‘impulses’, and that the self-regulation won by, or granted to, skilled
workers, bears a close resemblance to the self-government granted to English
professions. Both manual and non-manual workers differ, therefore, in exactly
the same way from their Russian, French, and American counterparts. We
must therefore recognize that we are dealing with a national phenomenon,
and accordingly find an explanation that applies to all kinds of English
workplaces, and all kinds of work, both manual and non-manual, both
employed and self-employed, both high status and low status, since the
‘power of voluntary cohesion and cooperation’ and the ‘impulse to asso-
ciate’ is evident in them all, and both employers and governments were
evidently inclined, over many generations, to respect it.
A satisfactory explanation of such an enduring and widespread form of

work relationship can only be political, since it coincides with, and depends
on, a distinctive relationship between the state and organized interests in
civil society and must simultaneously explain a variety of institutional
interconnections – between professional associations, universities, schools
and vocational training institutions, trade unions, and employers – that
sustained it, and enabled it to be transmitted from one generation to the
next. The only political event that seems of sufficient magnitude and reso-
nance to explain such a range of distinctive institutional interconnections
is the Glorious Revolution, for no other event seems able to explain why
English state should differ so markedly and continuously from the other
three, why it should accept that organized interests in civil society should
be granted self-governing powers similar to those granted to the ancient
professions and why newly-emergent organized interests in turn felt they
had the right to assert them in preference to some other form of collective
action.
The root cause of the peculiarities of the English workplace, therefore,
was that it modernized by adapting, mimicking and re-inventing rather
than discarding, medieval corporate institutions, a conclusion that every-
one knows or intuits, but no historical or sociological theory prepares one
to analyse and explore. Only one other industrial society seems to resemble
the English in this respect, the other island kingdom off the Eurasian land-
mass, Japan, though there the heirs and modernizers of medieval institu-
tions were corporations rather than organized occupations. The other three
societies investigated here are decisively different. Russia and the United
States never had any significant corporate institutions to inherit, adapt or
rediscover. France most certainly had, but they were battered or destroyed
by the revolution. Compagnonnages survived, as we have seen, though only
as antiquarian semi-secret fraternities, and one of the later re-enactments of
the great revolution, in 1848, finished them off.160 The French therefore
had to create their classes on a new footing. In England alone, medieval
corporate institutions survived to remind and persuade barristers and baggage-
handlers alike that market exchanges and employment relationships ought
properly to be tempered by collective action and rules. In asserting and
enforcing their corporate rules, non-manual and manual workers provided
a foundation for the formation of their respective classes.
Class solidarities compared
We have now identified a fundamental similarity in the organizational core

of the middle and working classes, and also a fundamental difference: the
state’s response to the self-regulatory aspirations of the constituent organ-
ized bodies of the two classes. The solidarity of the two classes also differed
markedly. That of the middle class rested, we have already observed, not on
their interdependence or on any unified class-wide organization, but on the

similarity of their associations and aspirations, their tendency to imitate
and emulate one another, and on a rough approximation in their manners,
mores and status. Their solidarity was therefore, to borrow Durkheim’s
term, mechanical. By contrast, that of manual workers rested on a greater
degree of interdependence, for though their organized occupations also
imitated and emulated one another, and defended their own occupational
interests as selfishly as professionals, they also recognized at times that they
could not deal either with the state or with their employers on their own.
As individual occupations, they were weaker and more vulnerable than
professions, and needed each other. For that reason, their solidarity might
reasonably be described as organic.
Craft unions felt the need to form a collective body to define and repre-
sent their common interests soon after they became national organizations.
In 1868 five of them formed the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the first
permanent, national trade union federation in the world. It has endured
ever since, never splitting, and never having had to deal with significant
rivals or dissidents for long, all of which might lead us to assume that the
organic solidarity of English working class was a spontaneous and natural
evolutionary process. In the event, a common status as employees, and
common exploitation and suffering, were not enough to unify workers as a
class. No English trades ever relaxed their exclusive rules in the interests of
solidarity with their working class brothers. In his entire account of the
‘making of the working class’, Thompson provided not a single instance.
One might also recall that the TUC was initially indifferent to universal
manhood suffrage, and excluded semi- and unskilled workers for some
three decades after its formation. It only recognized the claims and inter-
ests of the semi- and unskilled workers, or of that ‘portion of the working
community’, in the words of one of their outstanding leaders, ‘that is not
called upon to keep one occupation for life’, because of pressure from the
‘new unions’ which began to be organized in the late 1880s.161 These ‘new
unions’ often ignored the jurisdictional claims of the TUC unions, com-
peted for their current or potential members, pouring scorn on their
mutual benefit functions, and dismissing them as ‘coffin clubs’.
The transition from the organization of the elite of skilled workers to the
organization of workers of all levels of skill therefore was no more natural
and automatic than it was in Russia, France, and the United States, and
provoked conflict within the union movement just as it had in those coun-
tries.162 It was, however, completed in an entirely different manner. It did
not entail the forcible destruction of the skilled workers’ unions as in
Russia. It did not involve the voluntary surrender of unions’ trade protec-
tion functions in favour of some greater revolutionary goal as in France,
and it did not require comprehensive state intervention, and the splitting
of the existing national labour federation as in the United States. Instead,
the craft unions of the TUC began to respond sympathetically to the fiery,
socialist rhetoric, and to the successful recruitment campaigns, of the ‘new
unions’ of ‘workers without an occupation for life’, and after a few years
quarrelling, the two kinds of union were reconciled, and united in the
TUC, and a short time later together formed the Labour Party. Thereafter
craft unions became more willing to make use of class rhetoric, and began
to recruit workers who had not ‘served their time’, though usually in sep-
arate membership categories. In short, trade and class were reconciled, not
always harmoniously, but sufficiently for workers committed to defending
their trade jurisdictions to unite in the same labour federation with those
who had not yet established theirs, and even with those who were unlikely
ever to do so.
As a result of the years of competition between the two kinds of union,
however, the basis of union organization had become somewhat confused.
Some of the new unions had tried to recruit all the workers in a single indus-
try. Other so-called general unions had moved across industries recruiting all
those of a certain kind or level of work. Many analysts were thereafter
reluctant to characterize the organizational structure of British unions as a
whole, which might leave the impression that unions recruited promiscu-
ously, on any and every basis. This was far from being the case, as our work-
place evidence has already suggested. Beneath their sometimes misleading
names, and beneath their national administrative structures, trade or occu-
pation remained by far the dominant basis of union organization and
action. The fact that some of the new unions returned, or one might say
repatriated, members of the skilled trades that they had managed to recruit
during the years of open competition, suggests that craft unions had not
compromised on this matter. Newly-organized ‘industrial’ unions therefore
frequently failed, or declined, to incorporate skilled workers of their indus-
try. So-called ‘general’ unions were often organized internally by trade.163
Many of the craft unions who had responded to the competition by
mergers usually did so under an umbrella for ‘amalgamated’ or ‘allied’
trades, names that constantly recur in the work of Marsh and Ryan, who
meticulously traced the genealogy of thousands of local trade societies.164
Moreover, new and old alike, whether they were described as general or
industrial or craft unions, adopted a front-line organization of shop stew-
ards and concerned themselves with the ‘trade’ interests of their members
just like the original craft unions. And when the white collar workers began
to organize unions, they too did so overwhelmingly by profession or occu-
pation, or along kin networks of similar occupations.
The reconciliation between the ‘new model’ craft unions and the ‘new’
(general or industrial) unions did not therefore require workers’ to sur-
render their most durable and redoubtable organizational asset, the craft
union. The democratic habits of these unions were maintained, and this in
all probability explain why British unions were later found to be far more
democratically governed than their American counterparts.165 In the other

three countries, the transition had meant that responsibility for determin-
ing the interests of the working class passed from workers themselves to
officials of one sort or another, to party and state officials in Russia, and to
full-time career union officials in France and the United States. In both
France and the United States as we have seen, union officials disagreed
about what the interests of the working class might be at any particular
time, and as a result their union movements divided and fragmented. By
maintaining the trade basis of organization, British union leaders and officials
had less opportunity to have such disagreements, or at least to carry them
to the point of splitting of the union movement, and the degree of class
solidarity was often left for British workers themselves to decide, unofficially,
on the shop floor, in the course of labour disputes. Would they, or would
they not, cross a picket line? Would they or would they not ‘come out’ in
support of their fellow workers? Disagreements about the interests of the
working class as a whole passed to another forum – the Labour Party.
Occupational organization was, therefore, an essential part of the for-
mation of the working class in England. Marx assumed that a class could
only be formed after the dissolution of occupational loyalties, when, as he
put it in the Communist Manifesto, ‘the various interests and conditions of
life within the ranks of the proletariat are more equalized in proportion as
machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour.’ Once this had happened,
he anticipated that workers would no longer be concerned with petty trade
issues, would come to recognize their common class situation and class iden-
tity, thereby move out of the economic realm into the political, and engage
in class struggle.166 English workers proved him wrong by forming a class,
and entering the political realm, while still building and strengthening
trade and occupational barriers, and still inventing invidious ‘distinctions
of labour’ between one occupation and another. In all probability, the English
working class was stronger and better organized than either the French or
American, precisely because the organized labour movement contrived to
incorporate trade loyalties rather than destroying or undermining them.
Workers proved perfectly capable of transcending such distinctions as and
when provoked as a class, while subsequently returning to uphold them.
And in the Labour Party they formed their own permanent, and effective
political organization, while the Russian, French and American unions, which
had all transcended and abandoned the trade basis of organization, failed
to do so.
One might compare, as many have done, the outbreaks of working class
action in France, with some violent, explosive or volcanic natural force.
Since violent protest was such a minor part of the growth of the working
class in England, a more apt metaphor might be a coral reef, growing by
the continuous emergence of ‘narrow’ and local occupational loyalties,
which slowly affiliated with one another to form national amalgamations.
Marsh & Ryan’s three-volume ‘directory’ of the origins, histories and inter-
relationships of some 5,000 local unions provided a breathtaking diorama
of the accretions to this coral reef over more than two centuries.167
There is no similar diorama of the English middle class. The chart of the
110 ‘qualifying associations’ compiled by Millerson, and the directory of
the codes of ethics of 509 professional bodies assembled by Harris are
perhaps a start.168 The analogy with a coral reef is, however, somewhat less
fitting, for though they show a steady cumulation of durable associations,
which borrow institutions from one another, and to a degree therefore
depend on one another, they are all proudly independent. They more closely
resemble the near and distant cousinhood of family trees. There is the large
medical family of 13 ‘royal colleges’ all descended from the original College
of Physicians, an even larger family of 36 engineering professions, all stem-
ming from the Civils who organized in the eighteenth century, a fair-sized
accountancy one, full of family rivalries, and the little legal cluster stemming
from the four inns of court, and including the Law Society, the Barristers’
Clerks Association, and the Institute of Legal Executives. Members of these
‘families’ differ greatly amongst themselves of course, and it is only when
one looks at the other three societies, that one sees any family resemblances at
all. If one keeps these other societies in mind, the family resemblance even
extends to trade unions, since there was one institution which professional
associations and unions were both committed, and above all else explains
why they were both able to endure and reproduce themselves from the
eighteenth to the late twentieth century – all were committed to practice-
based, practitioner-controlled training. This was so much a part of English
life, that it deserves a study all to itself. Here it will be considered briefly,
focusing specifically on its likely contribution to the reproduction and soli-
darity of the middle and working classes.
A powerful agency of class formation
One result of the autonomy granted to English professions was that they
were never forced by the state, like the Russian or French, to require univer-
sity education as a condition of admission. And since they retained control
of admission to their ranks, and supplied the only marketable credential for
their members, new entrants were never obliged, as in the United States, to
obtain a university diploma to distinguish themselves from self-taught
and self-proclaimed competitors. The organized professions therefore had
no reason to abandon their traditional practice-based and practitioner-
controlled training, even though some of them came to accept a university
degree as an optional extra. Engineering professions only required a university
degree a generation or so ago, in 1971. Other professions, like the two legal
professions, still do not require it, though the non-graduate entry route to
both has lapsed because most school leavers intending to enter them fol-
lowed their sixth-form friends and peers to university, rather than because
they were required to do so.169 English employers and managers remained
similarly committed to practice-based training until the late twentieth
century, which is why Granick found British firms to be distinctively egali-
tarian, and more inclined than those in other countries to promote from
the shop-floor.170
Sociologists of education have often wrung their hands over the English
children who were denied the opportunity of going to university, which
they assumed was because they were forced to leave school at an early age,
or lacked funds, or because there were too few university places. They seldom
considered what to them was evidently unthinkable, that some at least of
those who could well afford it, and were well-qualified, might not wish to
go. Perkin’s study of the educational backgrounds of 3,277 in ten ‘major
elite groups’ in Britain between 1880 and 1978 showed that ‘Until recently,
a third of the new peers, half the great landowners, over half the company
chairmen, nearly two-thirds of the millionaires, and most of the accoun-
tants, the architects and solicitors’ had not attended a university at all.’171 If
we widen our perspective to include all males categorized as ‘Class I’ in the
Oxford Mobility study in 1972, we find that less than a quarter had attended
university. In 1998, England and Wales were found to have much the lowest
relationship between the highest level of education and entry into the highest
‘two classes’ of 13 developed societies.172 Many qualified and economically
advantaged young people had evidently preferred, or utilized, alternative
routes into these ‘two classes’ provided by practice-based and practitioner-
controlled training.173 For the professions, of course, this was often the
mandatory route, while continuing to university was an optional extra, a
mere frill, and therefore a minority choice. Even, however, when practice-
based training was not mandatory and formally regulated, as in industry,
many evidently preferred it rather than continuing to university.174
English manual workers have been no less committed to practice-based
training than their ‘betters’. Apprenticeships in England and Wales reached
a peak in 1969, when 42.6% of male school leavers, and 7.1% of female,
entered them, while a further 14% of boys and 15% of girls were entering
employment with ‘planned training, apart from induction training’.175 And
though critics also wrung their hands over the inadequate provision of
technical schools, the evidence shows that the supply of English technical
training frequently outstripped the demand right through the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.176 Formally at least, apprenticeship was not quite
as practitioner-controlled as professional training because a third party was
involved, an employer. Articles of indenture were usually signed by the
father of the apprentice and his son’s employer, rather than with ‘prac-
titioners’ themselves, that is, skilled workers and their unions. In practice,
however, union representatives and members took a great interest in appren-
tices, as some of the empirical research cited above has demonstrated. Their
number and payment were routine subjects of collective bargaining with

employers. And while employers might require apprentices to attend ‘day
release’ courses at local technical schools, or even create company schools for
them, most of their training was de facto both practice-based and practitioner-
controlled since day-to-day responsibility for them rested with skilled workers.
Once we recognize the enduring appeal of this alternative form of further
education for all classes, many of the well-known and well-documented
historical peculiarities of English schools and universities become com-
prehensible: why, for instance, many of the free grammar schools formed
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries disappeared and had to be
re-suscitated or re-established in the early-twentieth, why the newly-created
civic universities in the nineteenth-century industrial cities languished for
decades for want of students, why English universities as a whole remained
elitist and non-vocational until their sudden transformation over the past
two decades, why the provision of secondary education in England long
lagged behind so many less wealthy societies, why free grammar school places
remained unoccupied in the interwar years, and why technical education
remained a ‘missing stratum’ of the English educational system.177 In the
present context, however, the traditional preference of English people, of
all classes, for practice-based, practitioner-controlled post-school education
is important for only one reason: it is one of the most powerful agencies of
class socialization imaginable.
To begin with, it diverted young men from the path of individual better-
ment provided by schools and universities, reduced in other words the chances
that they might rise out of their class rather than with it. During the years
when young men entered both adulthood and the labour market and their
adult identities were being formed, they were instructed not only in the
technical requirements of their jobs, but also in the jurisdictional and status
claims of the occupation they hoped to enter, and current practitioners could
convey to them by their example the appropriate manners and demeanour
when dealing with neighbouring occupations, both inferior and superior.
They were also necessarily inducted into a network of colleagues and acquain-
tances, to some of whom they were likely to incur obligations, and there-
fore also a sense of loyalty to the professional association or union, as well as
to the class, to which, as a matter of course, they were learning to belong.
Practice-based, practitioner-controlled training arrangements of organ-
ized occupations seem therefore to have been a powerful means by which
class attitudes and loyalties were reproduced and reinforced among the
English people.178 What other agency could or compete with them in national
coverage? What other agency can explain the loyalties and moral sentiments
that classes must elicit if they are to endure? Class consciousness did not,
after all, arrive from space, like some malignant spore that happened to
settle on the English people. It was something more than a free-floating
spirit, something more substantial than the butterfly of an opinion caught
in the net of a passing pollster. It must have had some concrete associa-
tional and institutional moorings beyond the family, some human agents
in civil society who organized to construct class barriers, class distinctions
and class stereotypes, and human messengers who passed on class values
and obligations at work and play, in formal meetings and casual conversa-
tion. Professions and trade unions are much the most likely candidates,
indeed the only candidates. Who and where are their rivals? What other
collective associations have had as long a history, and have organized as
effectively across England? What other associations could have had a com-
parable impact at an impressionable age? What other associations have
been able to socialize their members as continuously, or define the division
of labour as effectively, or locate their class position as indelibly, or exercise
as much influence over working lives? What other associations and insti-
tutions, one might finally ask, have distinguished the English as sharply
from the Russians, the French and the Americans?
What’s in a name? Laissez faire versus laissez gouverner
Up to this point, while referring frequently to the relationship between the

state and civil society in England, and explaining how it has contributed to
the formation and continuation of three classes, we have declined to give
it a name. One reason for this hesitation was that this relationship has
assumed a rather different complexion according to time and circumstance.
In White’s account of the early forms of ‘self-government at the king’s
command’, it often verges on conscription. English judges long looked on
juries in the same manner, that is to say, they saw them not as public-spirited
representatives of the community, but as subjects conscripted to perform a
function for the state. They therefore did not hesitate to harangue, and even
punish them, if they did not decide as expected. Over the first half of the
seventeenth century, the sovereign and the inns of court, the primary organ-
ized interest in civil society, plainly had quite conflicting views of the nature
of their relationship. James I and Charles I issued what they thought were
orders, which the inns received as advice. If one traces that relationship, or
the relationship between the state and other professions it seems at times to
be one of collaboration and partnership, at other times indifference, and at
still others, of suspicion and antagonism. It is therefore difficult to think of a
single term that could do justice to the various forms that it has taken.
Spokesmen, theorists, and partisan ideologues give names that stick to pol-
itical phenomena, and this relationship had no place or need for any of them,
since it was long taken for granted as the normal English way of doing things.
After remaining anonymous for all this time, one may reasonably wonder
whether we should worry now about giving it a name.
The answer is that that we should, for without a name, it is bound to be
known by that which it most closely resembles, its look-a-like, laissez faire.
Keynes defined laissez faire as ‘a doctrine that, whether on divine, natural

or scientific grounds, State Action should be narrowly confined and eco-
nomic life left, unregulated so far as may be, to the skill and good sense of
individual citizens actuated by the admirable motive of trying to get on in
the world.’179 But this would be a very misleading and inaccurate descrip-
tion of the relationship between the state and civil society we have been
discussing, and hence, if it is not distinguished from laissez faire and appro-
priately named, there will be endless confusion.
To begin with, it will be clear that the relationship we are referring to is
much older than laissez faire. It assumed its distinctive character during the
early formation of the English state, and was central to the disputes of the
revolutionary era, that is to say, long before anyone had coined the phrase,
or recommended a policy of laissez faire. It was the original, implicit, taken-
for-granted, habitual relationship between the state and civil society in
England, while laissez faire is a comparatively ‘modern’ economic doctrine,
which defined a desirable relationship, not between the state and civil society
as a whole, including legal, religious and educational institutions, but
between the state and individual economic actors.
Moreover, the ancient, habitual relationship presupposed rather different
roles for both the state and for civil society than the doctrine of laissez faire.
It assumed that the role of the state was to empower organized, representa-
tive groups of known, even named, persons, within civil society, whom it
trusted to use the monopoly powers granted to them in the public interest.
The state did not suppose, or wish, to promote competition between such
chartered groups. Indeed, if competing groups of applicants claimed to rep-
resent some body of practitioners, neither of them were likely to obtain any
state support. Newly-organized occupations, aspiring to be recognized as a
profession, were routinely opposed on the grounds that their application
infringed their monopoly of existing ones in some respect. In 1831, the
first Law Society was finally granted a charter under the rather clumsy title
of the ‘Society of Attorneys, Solicitors, Proctors and others not being barris-
ters practising in the Courts of Law and Equity in the United Kingdom’,
just in case the unwary might confuse the newly-chartered profession with
the legal practitioners long-established in their inns of court. Hence, peti-
tioners had first to negotiate a consensus or near-consensus, both amongst
themselves and with already established professions, about the boundaries
of the jurisdiction within which they hoped to be granted monopoly
powers. The state might then recognize their title and jurisdiction, and
grant such powers as it deemed appropriate, to enable them to train and
licence future practitioners and to regulate existing practitioners. Obviously,
since it was granting them a monopoly, it did not expect them thereafter to
compete with anyone. On the contrary, it seems to have expected them
to bring some order both to their own occupation and to society as a whole,
by ethical restraints on their members’ competitiveness.
Clearly, it would be confusing and absurd to describe this relationship,

entailing the empowerment and trust of groups of named individuals, as
laissez faire. Proponents of laissez faire doctrine sought the very opposite,
that the state should not empower or place its trust in any particular group,
however honourable and worthy, but should instead place its trust in the
mechanism of the market, and in the self-interest, and ‘skill and good
sense’ of unnamed and unknown individuals, ‘actuated’, as Keynes put it,
‘by the admirable motive of trying to get on in the world.’ The one thing
that the two forms of relationship seem to have in common is that both
assume that ‘he governs best who governs least’, and that the state’s proper
stance is ‘hands off’, but that said, there remain considerable differences in
their view of the role of the state immediately before it takes its hands off.
In the habitual relationship, the state had to evaluate carefully the argu-
ments, representativeness, and trustworthiness of the claimants, and then to
decide the jurisdiction and powers that might be appropriately granted to
them. All being well, no further state action would then be required, unless
the chartered body demonstrated it was not worthy of the trust placed in it.
Under the doctrine of laissez faire, the state had only to dismantle any form
of protection and regulation that it might previously have erected, and
thereafter had to leave the market to decide between the claimants and to
determine the division of the labour between them.
The doctrine of laissez faire is, however, ambiguous about whether any
further state might be required. Dicey noted long ago that, if literally
applied, and the state took no further action, it would not lead to com-
petitive markets at all, but to regulation by informally-organized groups of
businessmen, so that if the state really wished to maintain competitive
markets, it would be involved in continuous regulation of economic acti-
vity to ensure it remained competitive. We may therefore distinguish an
active laissez faire policy to refer to a state which, like the American, takes
steps to continuously preserve market competition, and to passive laissez
faire to a state which does not. Observing that the latter more accurately
described the way British labour relations had evolved, Kahn-Freund coined
the term laissez faire collectivism, that is, a state that left organized groups in
civil society to behave as they wished. However, for our purposes it seems
preferable to find a term which distinguishes the ancient, habitual relation-
ship between the English state and the collective actors of civil society to
which we have referred more emphatically from its look-a-like. Perhaps
laissez-nous règler nos affaires nous-mêmes, or laissez-nous nous gouverner.
Laissez gouverner will do.
Once we have distinguished the two relationships in this manner, we are
better able to trace their contrasting histories without becoming tied up in
knots. Clearly, many English institutions, like the jury, the inquest and
other summonses and ‘assemblings’ that interested White, owed their auto-
nomy to laissez gouverner, not to laissez faire. Similarly, the self-government
of the inns of court, of the guilds and companies in London and other
cities, of the more ancient public schools, of the Royal College of Physicians,
and the universities, derive from the ancient habit of laissez gouverner, not
from the doctrine of laissez faire. At a certain point, in the late eighteenth
century, however, the ancient, habitual relationship of laissez gouverner and
the economic doctrine of laissez faire began to co-exist, and their complex
and subtle interrelationship commenced.
Initially, it seems safe to say, the doctrine of laissez faire was only found
credible and appealing, and only became orthodox opinion, because the
pre-existing habitual relationship between the state and civil society of
laissez gouverner provided some support for it. Much the same seems to be
true of the official economic doctrines of other countries we have been
examining. No one supposes that the economic doctrine of mercantilism
persuaded French kings strictly on its intellectual merits, or that the ideo-
logy of socialism attracted Russian intellectuals simply because it was a
demonstrably superior form of economic and social organization. The way
was prepared for both of these doctrines by the pre-existing relationship
between the state and civil society in the two societies. And so it was with
laissez faire in England.180 However, while the doctrine initially depended
on the support of the habitual relationship of laissez gouverner, there was no
reason to expect they should thereafter invariably coincide.
Many of the corporate institutions established after the rise of the doctrine
of laissez faire, would seem to have continued to draw on the traditional
habitual response of laissez gouverner. Thus the continual chartering of new,
self-governing professions through the nineteenth century can hardly be
attributed to laissez faire, since it only continued a practice long-established
before laissez faire had been thought of. And though the continued growth
of the public schools has sometimes been attributed to the doctrine of
laissez faire, it likewise seems to have owed more to the traditional relation-
ship between the state and civil society. As it happened, virtually every notable
proponent of the doctrine of laissez faire in the nineteenth century made
an exception of education, and acknowledged that this was a legitimate
function, even a duty, of the state, which suggests, since this consensus was
long ignored, that in this area at least the habit was much stronger than
the doctrine.181
The state’s attitude towards trade unions also seems to have been informed
more by the habitual and traditional laissez gouverner than by the doctrine
of laissez faire. In 1814, as we have seen, Parliament repealed the 1563
Statute of Artificers, which meant that the relationship between organized
labour and the state reverted to that which obtained before the 1563 statute.
It seems odd to call this reversion to pre-Statute practice a triumph of laissez
faire, though that is how it is often portrayed. Derry, the historian of the
unsuccessful campaign for re-enactment of the Statute, would have none of
it. He pointed out that such ‘economic doctrines … were not particularly
emphasized in the debates.’ In the end, he thought ‘… the Act of 1814 did
not owe its inception to the adoption by Parliament of a coherent new eco-
nomic policy, but was the child of an age of political chaos and govern-
mental ineptitude.’182 Ten years later, in 1824, when the Combination Laws
were all repealed, state policy might then reasonably be said to have been
informed by the doctrine of laissez faire, though only in the passive sense
of the term, since no measures were taken to prevent the trade unions from
organizing as they wished. Thereafter they survived in a legal limbo, subject
only to random and capricious prosecution for the common law offences
of conspiracy or restraint of trade.
In 1871, however, the state reverted decisively to its habitual laissez
gouverner, for the Trade Union Act of that year gave unions ‘unconditional,
unlimited freedom to combine’ and an unusual and privileged legal status
whereby agreements of a trade union, although lawful, were not legally
enforceable should damages be sought by an employer or a disgruntled
member, for their breach. In 1875, this privileged status was confirmed by
the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act, which altogether exempted
trade unions from prosecution for criminal conspiracy, no matter what
they did.183 When in 1901 the House of Lords, to most observers’ surprise,
decided that a trade union was liable for damages for picketing and per-
suading employees of the Taff Vale Railway Company to break their con-
tracts with the company, the government immediately appointed a Royal
Commission. Against the advice of the majority report, the new Liberal
Government decided, in 1906, to give trade unions complete immunity for
torts ‘alleged to have been committed by or on behalf of the trade union.’
Dicey was shocked, and claimed that ‘it makes a trade union a privileged
body exempted from the ordinary law of the land. No such privileged body
has ever before been created by an English Parliament.’184 Even the trade
unions most devoted friends, such as Sydney and Beatrice Webb, were
astonished.185 Nonetheless, over the next 60 years, Parliament continued to
reaffirm the immunities of trade unions whenever they seemed threatened.186
How are we to explain this consistent policy? There is, one might first
observe, no evidence that it was the result of sustained and irresistible
union pressure. And it clearly has little to do with laissez faire, but by refer-
ence to laissez gouverner it becomes intelligible. One may infer that over the
years since the repeal of the Combination Laws during which trade unions
had been left in a legal limbo, their public image as potentially dangerous
conspiracies had been replaced by one which saw them as law-abiding
representative bodies. As a result, Parliament was willing to grant them
immunities in 1871, similar to those already granted to the professions,
universities and other chartered bodies, to confirm these immunities in
1875 and reinforce them after they had been challenged by the courts, in
1906. Dicey might in all candour have pointed out that there were other
privileged bodies ‘exempted from the ordinary law of the land’, most
notably the corporate bodies of his own profession, the four inns of court.187
Trade unions were not, therefore, ‘uniquely privileged’. They were, in fact,
being treated like the professions, and on matters in which they and their
members were intimately involved, similarly came to have a considerable
influence on government attempts to define the public interest.188
Drawing a clear distinction between the habitual, collectivist, relation-
ship between the state and civil society, and the doctrinal, individualist,
market-oriented one, is thus indispensable for analytical purposes. It
enables us to see how the doctrine of laissez faire was checked, qualified
and circumscribed by the more ancient commitment to laissez gouverner.
Earlier in the investigation, we encountered one striking example of the
interplay between the two, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.
When the British belatedly decided to inaugurate a competition policy by
establishing this body after World War II, they were evidently influenced
more by the traditional laissez gouverner relationship than by the doctrine
of laissez faire, or hoped somehow to reconcile the two. They therefore
attempted, as Wilks has shown, to preserve market competition by indus-
trial ‘self-regulation’ rather than by adopting an active laissez faire policy of
rigorous and punitive state intervention to maintain competitive markets
like the Sherman Antitrust Act in the United States. Not surprisingly, many
foreign observers were completely baffled, and failed to see how the MMC
could be called a competition policy at all.189
The most important contribution that the distinction between laissez
faire and laissez gouverner brings to the analysis of social and political events
comes, however, at the very end of the period under review. After the elec-
tion of Mrs Thatcher’s first government in the spring of 1979, the inherent
contradictions between the two were recognized for the very first time, and
her governments made no attempt whatever to reconcile one with the other.
They rejected altogether the habitual, collectivist assumptions of laissez
gouverner and imposed policies inspired by unqualified and undiluted laissez
faire. From our point of view, it is the former, the rejection of laissez gouverner,
which is the more important, since that entailed the termination of the
long collaboration between the state and civil society, and therefore the
dismantling of the corporate structures on which classes had long depended.
However, before examining these events, we need to pause to test our expla-
nation of the formation and endurance of England’s classes.
9
Testing the Puzzle-solving Capacity
of the Argument
The theory may be tested in time-honoured ‘whodunnit’ manner, by seeing

how well it can provide answers to frequently asked questions about classes
in England, those with which we began, but also others that have arisen
along the way.
Why didn’t an intelligentsia emerge in England?
In both Russia and France, we have encountered class-like formations of

intellectuals, both of which had a considerable degree of self-consciousness
and of public recognition. In England, it was far more difficult to do this.
The nearest counterparts of the Russian and French intelligentsia were, I
suppose, the early Fabians, the Bloomsbury ‘group’, or the Cliveden ‘set’,
but these were tiny, exclusive, ephemeral groups of writers and thinkers,
rather than nationally-recognized strata or classes, and they disappeared
when their members moved house or died. This is not, of course, to say
that England never had any intellectuals. Like every other industrializing
society, it had an ever-increasing number of individuals who had an advanced
education, earned their living by their brains rather than their hands, and
who were interested in the world of ideas, and might therefore be reason-
ably described intellectuals.1 In England, however, such people never formed
an identifiable and self-conscious collectivity, alienated from the state and
from the society around them. Moreover, they seldom claimed to be the con-
science of the nation, and rarely received any special respect or status by
virtue of their intellectual activities.
This lack of public recognition of, and respect for, intellectuals was noticed
by foreign observers. In his Notes on England, written between 1860 and 1870,
Taine repeatedly commented on the contrast between the high position
accorded writers, distinguished journalists and artists in Paris, and their
insignificant position in England where, he thought, they ‘remain in the
second rank’, except for ‘a handful of the most distinguished, such as Stuart
Mill, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray and Tennyson.’ He concurred
275
with Stendhal’s jibe that ‘Intelligence and talent lose twenty five per cent
of their worth on arrival in England.’2 Annan’s study of the ‘intellectual
aristocracy’ in nineteenth-century England was less concerned with this
lack of respect for intellectuals than with the other side of the coin, that
is, intellectuals’ lack of estrangement from the society around them. A
paradox, he thought, ‘has puzzled both European and American observers
of English life: the paradox of an intelligentsia which appears to conform
with rather than rebel against the rest of society.’3 Other observers have
put the point in rather different ways, but even those who seem about to
disagree with him, end up by not doing so.4
Heyck, for instance, argued that ‘from a nominalist point of view … if
a social class is real, then it is only so in the minds of people at a given
time and place’, and by this criterion he thought the ‘intellectuals’ in late
Victorian England had emerged as a social class, since, in his view, the late
Victorians clearly thought of them as such. However, he went on to say, ‘if
a social class manifests itself in organizations, ideology, formal and infor-
mal social links and political action, all rising from common relation to the
means of production, then the answer is not so clear.’ Whilst late Victorian
English intellectuals had ‘many formal and informal social links amongst
themselves, mainly as a result of their common association with the uni-
versities, they also had almost as close social connections with the ruling
class – the landowners, the upper-middle class and the professions – as with
each other.’ In the end, he suggested, it would be ‘most reasonable to think
of them much as one thinks of the professions – separate from the ruling
class in some ways, but very much a part of it in others’. And intellectuals
were definitely not, in his view, independent political actors, since they
were always allied with one of the three major parties.5 From this some-
what convoluted argument, I conclude that Heyck thought that English
intellectuals did not have a distinctive collective identity and were rather
congenially integrated with the society around them.
Collini seemed anxious to tell the British that they have been deluding
themselves in thinking that they have had few intellectuals but after com-
paring them with French intellectuals, he also decided that they have, after
all, been a much less well-defined, recognizable and self-conscious social
formation, and that Britain had ‘by and large no … tradition of political
intervention by intellectuals conscious of their collective role.’6 In nine-
teenth-century England, intellectuals relied on their personal connections
with the traditional elite, and these personal ties, common in the mid and
late Victorian years, continued ‘deep into the twentieth century.’ Their
confidence was based on these social links rather than on their intellectual
credentials per se. In France, by contrast, intellectuals, had more ‘confidence
that intellectual activity was highly regarded by society in general and that
there existed within that society a smaller but still substantial, audience
responsive to one’s public statements.’ This audience, moreover ‘has been to
Testing the Puzzle-solving Capacity of the Argument 277
some extent conscious of a degree of isolation from society at large, consti-

tuting a sub-culture with its own institutions and forms of life.’ French intel-
lectuals who ‘signed a manifesto or wrote an article or addressed a public
meeting’, could therefore ‘expect support and perhaps even success.’7
Our earlier consideration of intellectuals in Russia and France suggests
three social preconditions for the formation and recognition of a distinct
collectivity or class of intellectuals: first, a political regime lacking popular
legitimacy, second, a growing body of educated people without other forms
of association, and third, a civil society unable and unused to organizing
and speaking for itself, enabling intellectuals to see themselves, and present
themselves, as its authentic voice. If we can now show, without inserting
any ad hoc arguments and variables, that the weakness or absence of these
same preconditions in England provides an explanation of why English
intellectuals never formed a class comparable to those of Russia or France,
our explanation of the process of class formation will have passed one
preliminary test.
The first precondition, the deficit of legitimacy of political institutions, is
the most difficult to assess comparatively, but it is probably reasonable to
say that British political institutions never suffered from a deficit of legit-
imacy on quite the same scale as those of Russia or even France. Intellectuals
could therefore support reform within the existing political system, and, as
Aron, Heyck, Annan and others argued, participate in it rather than being
collectively alienated from it, like their Russian, and to a lesser extent their
French counterparts.8 Nonetheless, one may recall that British political insti-
tutions did not rest on anything near universal manhood suffrage until
1884 at the earliest, and British society sufficient social and economic prob-
lems to disturb any intellectuals’ conscience – monumental inequalities,
along with mass illiteracy, ill health, squalid housing, poverty and cruelty –
which British governments had failed to solve or even address. If the other
two preconditions had been present, it is reasonable to suppose that an
intelligentsia would have emerged in England, but they were not. In both
respects it differed sharply from Russia and France.
England did not have a civil society that was unable to organize or speak
for itself, so it would have been a trifle presumptuous, even absurd, for intel-
lectuals to claim authority to speak for others who had to suffer in silence.
Their best opportunity to do so came with exposés of the working con-
ditions of many semi- and unskilled workers in the late 1880s and early
1890s who, as we have seen, had long been ignored by the unions of
skilled workers. Cardinal Manning, the Webbs, G.D.H. Cole and various
other sympathetic intellectuals offered their support, and were briefly iden-
tifiable as an embryo intelligentsia. Semi- and unskilled workers, however,
soon found their own leaders and gifted spokesmen, and formed their own
trade unions. Intellectuals therefore had no further collective role in the
labour movement, and could only contribute to it as individual members
of the Labour Party. England’s long-standing traditions of freedom of asso-

ciation and freedom of speech had, in other words, deprived intellectuals of
any standing or authority as representatives of mute masses.
Those traditions also meant of course that, unlike both Russia and France,
the growing body of educated people were not without other forms of associ-
ation. All those engaged in any form of intellectual employment or engaged
in any kind of intellectual pursuit formed their own specialized associations,
at a much earlier date, and far more frequently, than their counterparts in
Russia or France. Millerson’s list of associations leaves one wondering if there
was any kind of specialized knowledge, or any kind of intellectual interest,
that was not organized. Novelists and playwrights are the only ones that come
to mind, but they had their own platforms and arenas. Everyone with intel-
lectual interests in England could affiliate with someone of like interests. As it
happened, the great wave of professionalization in England and Wales at the
end of the nineteenth century, when dozens of new occupations sought to
emulate the self-government of the two ancient professions, and asserted their
collective identity and social role, coincided almost exactly with the emer-
gence of an intelligentsia in both Russia and France, when these two countries
had only one organized self-governing profession apiece, their advocates.
Both of these states had in fact mobilized expert knowledge for their own
purposes in centralized, state-sponsored academies before allowing special-
ists in civil society to spontaneously define their own fields and organize as
they wished. These academies had responsibility for the development of all
branches of knowledge, and therefore had a mission that transcended that
of any groups of enthusiasts and specialists, and any disciplinary demarca-
tions that they might have spontaneously devised. The intelligentsia in both
Russia and France sometimes appear to have been inspired by a similar sense
of obligation to society at large, especially when the actions of the state were
found to be less deserving of their allegiance. They might therefore be seen as
civil society’s informal alternative to the state-created, state-honoured, state-
paid intellectual elite, though not infrequently disaffected members of these
elites transferred their allegiance to civil society’s shadow ‘academy’.9
There was one comparable supra-professional official body in England, the
Royal Society, which had been chartered, interestingly enough, by Charles II
who, as we have seen, had no love for independent, intermediate bodies,
and hoped to subordinate them all to royal authority. It is interesting to
speculate what role the Royal Society might have assumed had Charles’s
brother been able to complete his quo warranto campaign, and had every
professional body been made subject to royal control. The fact is, however,
that after the Glorious Revolution, the Royal Society could not perform the
supervisory role of its Russian and French counterparts, and did not remotely
compare with them in authority, prestige, scale, funding or full-time per-
sonnel. It was a voluntary society, among other voluntary learned societies
and professional bodies, and competed with them in the task of evaluating
and recognizing contributions to knowledge, and honouring their leading

exponents. It had rather more prestige than other professional associations
perhaps, and was certainly more inter-disciplinary, but it was not the
acknowledged arbiter or pinnacle of scientific or cultural endeavour.
The coincidence between the rise of an intelligentsia in Russia and France,
and the mass mobilization of English professions prompts one to suggest
that England had no intelligentsia because it had self-governing professionals,
and that intellectuals and self-governing professionals are in fact alternative
social formations. They may co-exist, as Russian and French advocates demon-
strated, but they seem to have a zero-sum relationship. As professions
organize, they necessarily reduce the scope for the formation of a class of
intellectuals, since within the jurisdictions they have organized and regu-
lated, they do not acknowledge the claims or competence of any outsiders,
whether it be state officials or vaguely qualified or wholly unqualified all-
purpose intellectuals, and consider themselves the only experts. Professionals
are necessarily committed to the specialization and differentiation of know-
ledge, and their members are inclined to rate communication with each
other, through their own meetings and journals, with their own agendas,
debates and controversies, in their own private languages, more highly than
any dialogue with the general population. More importantly, they also define
and inculcate their own service ethics, and do not expect the state or the
church, or any outside body to provide one for them.
It follows that if professionals are extensively organized, they must under-
mine support for the trans-professional or supra-professional collectivity of
intellectuals, and for any mission or service ethic that might inspire and
unite them. Professional associations also undermine the formation of an
intelligentsia in a number of other ways. Having been granted the freedom
to organize, professionals could hardly remain as entirely estranged from
the existing political and social order as intellectuals were, since the grant
of a royal or parliamentary charter demonstrated some degree of state and
public recognition of their own expertise. Self-government seems to have
the same consequences everywhere. However rotten and illegitimate the
existing social order might be, it could not be all bad, since one little bit of
it, their bit, was acceptable, and even admirable. Professionals (and crafts-
men) may support the revolutionary transformation of the rest of society,
but they commonly resist the transformation of that little bit of it for
which they themselves have been granted responsibility.10
Professionals also restrict the range of subjects on which intellectuals can
claim to speak with any authority, and create multiple alternative arenas of
discussion, but their final decisive blow against an intelligentsia is that they
deprive intellectual leaders of followers, of audiences and of a rank and file.
The experience of both Russia and France suggested that an intelligentsia
requires an ample supply of educated people who will listen and take them
seriously. Those with somewhat uncertain prospects of future employment
seem to be particularly appreciative of their pronouncements. In England,

the practice-based admission and training procedures of self-governing pro-
fessions restricted the number of such people at source, and reduced the
uncertainties of finding employment in the future. O’Boyle found that,
over the first half of the nineteenth century, there was far more unemploy-
ment among those trained to enter the French legal, medical and other
professions than among their equivalents in England, and as a result, in her
view, England had less to fear from the ‘fatal unrest… of an intellectual
proletariat.’11 In the inter-war period, a similar contrast between relative
stability of British intellectual life and the turbulence and unrest on the
continent attracted much attention. Kotschnig sought to explain the
contrast by pointing out that, over the period from 1914 to 1934, England
had – in proportion to its population, to its rate of literacy, and to its level
of economic development – disproportionately few university students. It
also had, by comparison with continental Europe, very low rates of profes-
sional unemployment and overcrowding, and never produced ‘the pools of
unemployed intellectuals or would-be professionals’, which he thought
elsewhere posed a constant ‘threat to the established order’.12
O’Boyle attributed the difference between France and Britain in the nine-
teenth century simply to Britain’s faster rate of economic growth. Kotschnig
argued that in the inter-war period of the twentieth century there were ‘no
pools of unemployed intellectuals or would-be professionals’ in England,
because ‘the knowledge of incipient overcrowding spreads quickly and
causes a decline in the number enrolling in that subject.’13 By contrast, our
explanation is exactly the same for both periods, and simply refers back to
the practitioner control of entry to and training for the professions that we
discussed earlier. In the mid-nineteenth century, French professional
schools and universities admitted and graduated students without regard to
their employment prospects, whereas in England the majority of entrants
to the professions were not trained at universities at all, but by apprentice-
ship, so practitioners of all kinds were able to monitor and control admis-
sion to their own professions. It was still the same in the inter-war period.
Most would-be professionals in England at the time did not, as Kotschnig
put it, ‘enrol’ in any subject, or indeed go to any university. What they did
was to serve a pupillage, take articles, or serve some kind of apprenticeship,
and practising professionals could therefore respond to ‘incipient over-
crowding’ by declining to accept them.14
There is, of course, a time lag between the decision to accept a pupil and
his or her eventual employment, so it is unlikely that this mechanism worked
with such precision that it alone prevented the emergence of unemployed
professionals. However, it had one other characteristic which is relevant in
this context, in that it obliged every would-be professional to arrange their
articles or pupillage by themselves, and gave them little opportunity to
assemble with fellow students scattered across the country. They were not
therefore in any kind of ‘pool’, and were not available to serve as the rank
and file of an intelligentsia. In France, physical proximity, especially the con-
gregation of students around the intellectuals’ citadel, the educational insti-
tutions on the left bank of the Seine, seems to have been an important
element of both their self-consciousness and their wider social recognition.
In Russia, intellectuals were not clustered to quite the same extent, though
those in other cities seem to have depended considerably on their spiritual
links with Moscow and St. Petersburg. In England, by contrast, there was
no comparable physical or spiritual concentration. London was the head-
quarters of their own profession of course, and the postal address of the
body which set and marked the written part of their examinations. On the
great day when they qualified, they might perhaps visit the capital to be
admitted to their profession, but by then it was rather late to be spellbound
by some celebrated intellectual.
Throughout their tedious intervening years of articles, the would-be pro-
fessionals in England had little opportunity to share with others their thoughts
on matters that would normally interest intellectuals, such as the general
malaise of the country, of the world, or the human predicament, or for that
matter, to worry much about their future employment prospects. If they
did worry about such things, they worried alone. They were, after all, already
engaged in obtaining intensely practical knowledge about their chosen
field, already partly integrated into a professional work setting, and had reason-
able prospects of future employment, since principals usually accepted
some responsibility for finding a position for their pupils if they could not
employ them themselves. Moreover, articled clerks had already begun to
establish one essential requirement for any kind of professional practice: a
network of future colleagues and clients. Their anxieties could not there-
fore become part of a collective protest, as they might have done if they
had been studying together, and worrying together, at a university, listen-
ing to the pronouncements of some intellectual luminary.15
In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that intellectuals in England
should, as Collini observed, be less well-defined, less recognizable and less
self-conscious than in France, and that they should fail to find an audience
responsive to their public statements. French intellectuals tended, he
explained, to work more often through ‘groupings which formed around
ideological nodes’, and as a result, ‘the shapers and exponents of ideas’
have ‘a correspondingly more prominent role in the political culture.’ Their
perspectives were, he added, ‘universal, abstract and programmatic’. By
contrast, the perspectives of English intellectuals were, ‘local, historical and
qualitative.’ They focused on ‘the condition of England’, meaning the adverse
consequences of industrialization. Their concerns were the ‘loss of com-
munity’, ‘duty’ and ‘the building of character’.16 All of these, one might
note, were exactly the concerns that were likely to resonate, and have a
particularly strong appeal, in a society with well-organized professions.
In sum, our explanation of class formation that has rested on the relation-
ship between the state and civil society seems to pass this first test, since it
enables us to provide a reasonable explanation of the non-appearance of a
class of English intellectuals comparable to those in Russia or France. It is
not perhaps an especially severe test since there are no rival explanations.
Why were trade unions not interested in class warfare?
The second test is to explain the non-ideological and non-combative nature

of the English trade unions, or at least their reluctance to take part in mil-
itant struggle on behalf of their class. They were the first to organize, the
first to establish a national federation, which, bar a few expulsions, has
remained unified throughout its history, the first to establish a successful
political party, and they repeatedly demonstrated their power and combat-
iveness at the workplace. They declined, however, to convert their organ-
izational unity and muscle into class action on the streets. They were class
conscious, as the formation of the TUC and the Labour Party showed, but
evidently had little wish to embark on a class struggle outside Parliament
and were seldom receptive to intellectuals inspired by a vision of a classless
society, who urged them to do so. They infuriated Marx and Engels, and con-
tinued to infuriate intellectuals ever after, who recognized that they were the
only organized bodies who might plausibly challenge or threaten the existing
social and political order, but instead preoccupied themselves with what
appeared to them to be petty shopfloor issues. Anderson, a spokesman for
the New Left in the 1960s, remarked, with some desperation, ‘at whichever
level one chooses to look, the same fundamental paradox reappears. In Britain,
the working class has generated over 150 years a massive, adamantine class
consciousness. But it has never developed into a hegemonic force.’17
Perhaps the first, and maybe also the last, word of explanation is that
they were committed to parliamentary methods within their own unions,
within the TUC, and within the Labour Party, and within Parliament itself.
It would have been rather odd, and would have required some very special
provocation, for them suddenly to adopt the ideals and methods of French
unions. They rarely appear to have done so, but it is, one must admit,
extremely difficult to document their ‘class actions’. Marx warned against
‘the vulgar mind that confuses trade disputes with class struggles’, but failed
to give the criteria by which one might distinguish one from the other.
Official statistics do not of course make any such distinction. If we make
the rather debatable assumption that bloody and deadly labour confronta-
tions were more likely to be class conflicts, then it would seem that Britain
was almost devoid of class conflict, since it has had rather little violence
and few fatalities in its labour disputes.18 And if we also consider public
order offences, which class conflicts would presumably generate, then we
would probably come to the same conclusion. Most public order offences,
in nineteenth-century England at least, related to ‘ethnic’ conflicts, to Ireland,

and not to class at all.19
Trade unions’ class actions commonly took the quieter form of an appeal
for help from their ‘brothers’ either by a sympathy strike or by ‘blacking’
the supplies of the employer with whom others were in dispute, and class
action was therefore intertwined with the defense of trade interests. Help was
given on the understanding that any favour rendered would be reciprocated
at a later date. As soon as the crisis had passed, each union’s members
returned to the defence of its own trade interests. For much of the time,
therefore working class membership and solidarity was as passive and
dormant as that of the middle class, and only became active in an emer-
gency, when the state or employers provoked collective action across trades
and unions.
Commentators of the left sometimes talk up the amount of conflict and
protest in Britain, so the ‘Invergordon mutiny’ in 1919, for instance, as
polite and respectful as a mutiny can be, seems one step short of the Aurora
turning her guns on the Winter Palace.20 Most, however, have recognized
the British labour movement presents something of a problem if the working
class were supposed to be desperately longing to overthrow the capitalist
system, or if one supposed that class consciousness and action must inevit-
ably take a revolutionary form. Both Marx and Lenin realized that, in Britain
at least, the organization of labour did not automatically lead on to class
struggle. When he wrote What is to be done? Lenin had already given up on
trade unions. ‘Class political consciousness’, he wrote, ‘can be brought to
the workers only from without, that is only from outside the economic strug-
gle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.’21
In his later years he would apparently spit out the words ‘trade unionism’
in English to express his contempt, for narrow, selfish unionism that failed
to recognize its higher duties to its class or perform its anointed historical
role. Anderson thought that it was because the English working class came
into existence prematurely, that is before socialist thinkers, like himself
presumably, were ready to guide it in the proper direction.22
Once we acknowledge the occupational base of trade unions, and the
enduring primacy of defining and protecting a trade, as our explanation
has done, one may better understand the nature of English workers’ class
consciousness, and why it seldom prompted barricades on the streets and
violent public protests. All organized occupations, professions as much as
trade unions, have had limited and specific goals, which did not require
the overthrow of any other class, or of the existing social order, and did not
require a classless workplace. They were not really ‘going’ anywhere, other
than to improve their position relative to other occupations. The primary
goal of most English unions, most of the time, was simply to establish and
maintain a respected position within an existing occupational hierarchy.
Their combativeness was therefore directed against employers and
managers who wished to reorganize the workplace to their members’ dis-

advantage, or against other occupations that trespassed on their long-
established jurisdictions. In these two respects, they could be extremely
combative, and while the former sometimes took a class form and required
class solidarity, both were really in defence of the collective property rights
established by their predecessors.
The occupational basis of trade unionism also enables us to explain the
exceptional organizational unity of the British labour movement, about
which there can be little doubt. It developed just one central organization,
not six or seven competing ones like the French, nor three or four like the
American. It also successfully created just one political party, not multiple
parties like the French, nor did it offer its support to different parties like
the American. Only the Soviet labour movement was still more unified, but
their uniformity we have decided was that of the graveyard.
Few historians of class have sought to try and explain this unity, but the
trade basis of union organization enables us to do so. If trade unions are
organized as trades there can be only two kinds of inter-union competition
and dispute, or perhaps one, since they are really two sides of the same
coin: first, ‘demarcation’ disputes about which occupation and which union a
particular kind of work properly belongs to; and second, their corollary,
‘jurisdictional’ disputes about the union which should properly recruit the
workers who perform this kind of work. Such disputes could, of course, be
quite bitter and long-running, especially as new technologies emerged, and
especially among occupations whose members might belong to diverse
unions as a result of the muddying of the principle of occupational organ-
ization at the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, however tricky in
practice, most of these disputes were, in principle at least, arbitrable. In the
great majority of cases, they were in fact arbitrated, by the TUC itself, by
procedures codified at its Bridlington Congress in 1938.23 Occupation there-
fore provides a basis, and a principle, on which independent unions can
live together reasonably amicably, each recruiting workers within their own
defined jurisdiction. Once such a principle has been recognized and estab-
lished, working class organizational unity is feasible.
The French and American union movements, by contrast, had and have
no such agreed principle of organization, and never devised anything com-
parable to the Bridlington procedures.24 Their disputes were not therefore
arbitrable. Questions such as ‘To which union does this work belong to?’ or
‘Which union ought to recruit these workers?’ became meaningless in both
countries. As a result of the absence of any accepted principle of organ-
ization, their unions have been engaged in continuous internecine com-
petition for much of their histories. French unions had an additional source
of competitiveness because they were committed to furthering the interests
of the working class, and there is no principle to which one might appeal
to determine what those interests might be at any particular time. How, for
instance, is one to determine what might have been the interests of the
French working class with respect to the October Revolution in 1917? Or
the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939? Or the Marshall Plan in 1945? The ‘interests
of the working class’ in the face of such events, can only be a matter of specu-
lation and opinion, and inevitably therefore must provoke considerable
intra-union or inter-union debate and competition. If a working class was
meant to unite on the basis of its supposed common class interests, then it
is reasonable to say that working class unity has never been anything but a
mirage.
The continuous fragmentation of the political groups on the left every-
where only confirms the point. The leaders of such groups have to continu-
ously persuade members and potential members that they have somehow
or other correctly identified ‘the interests of the working class’, even though
any turn of events, or any turn of a page, might sow seeds of doubt. As a
result, fortuitous events and the finest doctrinal points repeatedly divide
them. The occupational interests and concerns of British trade unions are,
by contrast, concrete and constant, and familiar to every working member
of the trade. They therefore offer much less scope for bitter disagreements
that threaten union solidarity. Their leaders’ interpretations of the signi-
ficance of unfolding political events in the wider world are neither here nor
there, and their political ambitions remain their private concern.
A two-way comparison of British and French unions therefore suggests
that class unity is more likely when class consciousness is passive and par-
liamentary or, as Anderson put it, ‘adamantine’, and impossible if it is com-
mitted to revolutionary action.25 A working class cannot, it seems, be both
united and revolutionary. French trade unions decided to transcend the
trade loyalties of workers in the belief that once rid of these divisions, a
unified and revolutionary working class would then emerge. Their sub-
sequent history proved they were wrong, and the history of the British
labour movement as a whole showed that trade loyalties and divisions pro-
vided a more secure foundation for class unity.
The competitiveness of the American unions, did not of course spring
from the same ideological source as the French, since only the Knights and
the Wobblies hoped to organize the entire working class and claimed to be
acting in its interests. From its founding in 1883 to the breakaway of the
CIO in 1932, the AFL accepted occupation as the proper basis of union
organization, and over that period survived without splinter groups or
defections, and with a disputes procedure similar to that of the TUC.26
However, from the moment they abandoned the trade or occupational base
of union organization, American unions have been engaged in more or less
continuous competition with one another, like the French. Although for
some two decades the CIO finally reconciled with the AFL, it had itself had
several major defections in the interim. Moreover, once the NLRB started
to apply diverse criteria to define bargaining units, such as plant, division
or employer, unions started to recruit promiscuously, chasing members

wherever they might be found, organizing whoever might be included in a
bargaining unit that the NLRB defined, and conflict therefore became
endemic even within the re-united AFL-CIO. Such conflicts may, it is true,
be arbitrated by votes of workers themselves in representation elections
organized and then enforced by the NLRB, but these elections never finally
establish a principle, or even finally settle a particular case. The loser may, and
usually does, return to fight another day, so the competition is permanent.
A three-way comparison therefore suggests that the fundamental factor
explaining the distinctive organizational unity and class solidarity of British
unions has been their determination to maintain the trade basis on which
they were originally founded, despite amalgamations of allied trades and
the emergence of ‘industrial’ and ‘general’ unions. They knew better, it
seems, than Marx, Engels and countless other intellectuals who urged them
to transcend their original form of organization in favour of one that might
better enable them to mobilize as a class. The trade basis of English unions
also explains their reluctance to engage in class struggle on the streets, a
strategy which the French comparison suggests would only have under-
mined their class unity and eliminated their participation as a class in
democratic political life.
Why didn’t public ownership reduce class consciousness?
The idea that property ownership and market relations create classes, and
promote class conflict had one practical policy corollary of worldwide
impact, namely the belief that public ownership, by eliminating the capi-
talists who expropriated the surplus value of the workers’ labour, would
also eliminate classes and inaugurate a new spirit in employment relation-
ships. This proposition has been the foundation of socialism across the
world. It was long enshrined in the Constitution of the Labour Party, and
was one of the factors that encouraged post-war Labour Governments to
nationalize large sectors of privately-owned industry in Britain. It was not
the only factor by any means, since British nationalization measures were
usually preceded by reports which made a case on technical and invest-
ment grounds. Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that public ownership
attracted enthusiastic support, both within the affected industries and
beyond, because it was thought it would improve work relationships,
and help to create more egalitarian, more democratic, more harmonious,
and perhaps even classless, workplaces.
In the event, there were no indications that nationalization in Britain
improved employment relationships in Britain a jot. McKibbin noted that
‘labour relations … in those industries nationalized by the Attlee govern-
ment were no better under public than private ownership.’ He cited the
findings of fieldworkers who had spent years in mining areas after national-
ization who claimed they could give ‘scores of examples … of the prevailing
idea among workers that any suggestion emanating from management,
since it is designed for greater profit, is likely to be an underhand attack’
and so ‘coincidence of interests is unthinkable.’27 The idea that public owner-
ship might improve labour relations or ameliorate class differences soon
passed from public and scholarly consciousness. No student of class, even if
they supported public ownership, as many of them did, ever sought to demon-
strate its superiority on these grounds, or even bothered to compare the
two sectors to justify their convictions.
If anything, public sector employees seem to have been at the forefront
of labour conflicts through all the post-war decades in Britain, and they
remained so in the climacteric of the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1979 that
brought Mrs Thatcher to power, and in the coda of militant trade union-
ism, the miners’ strikes of 1981 and 1984.28 The initial hopes invested in
public ownership should not, however, be simply dismissed as misplaced,
since they pose another puzzle, and therefore another opportunity to test
the theory of class formation presented earlier. Why, we may ask, did national-
ization not have a beneficial impact on class relationships? Why was it
that, even though capitalist expropriators were eliminated, employment
relationships often seemed more rancorous, and disputes more common?
Can our theory provide a reasonable explanation?
Committed supporters of nationalization were not entirely unaware or
unembarrassed by disputes in the public sector. Their practised explanation
was that as nationalized enterprises remained a minority within a market
system, they were necessarily forced to operate on the same principles as
the private enterprises around them. They remained, as Miliband once put
it, ‘islands of socialist virtue in a sea of capitalist greed’.29 But, surely, the
islands should have given some hint of their ‘socialist virtue’ rather than
having to wait until the sea finally disappeared? In any case, by this expla-
nation, labour relations should only have been as bad as those in the private
sector, not, as often seemed to be the case, worse. Why should this be?
One answer to this question is to point to the distinctive employment
conditions of public enterprises, which are in certain significant respects
similar the world over. Public enterprises everywhere have been more favour-
ably disposed to unions than private employers, and therefore have higher
rates of unionization, which in turn has meant that public employees are
better organized to protect their interests by strike action. Other things
being equal, they have therefore been likely to have higher rates of labour
unrest and strikes. Public enterprises everywhere have also politicized the
normal employer-employee relationship to some degree, and therefore encour-
aged employees to make demonstrations in public against the government
to resolve their grievances. Moreover, governments have often been tempted
to use the public sector that they directly controlled as an instrument
of economic policy. In Britain, in the late 1960s and through the 1970s,
governments wishing to control inflation often imposed tighter limits on

public employees’ pay settlements than they could persuade private employ-
ers to impose on their employees. Perhaps we need look no further than
these three special conditions to explain the poorer industrial relations of the
public sector. There are no satisfactory comparative statistics to determine
whether we need to do so. If, however, we decide to look further, the explana-
tion of the way classes were formed in England given earlier helps to iden-
tify some distinctive characteristics of public ownership in Britain, including
some that probably exacerbated labour relations, and entrenched, rather
than reduced, class relationships and attitudes.
To begin with, our account of the distinctive traditional laissez gouverner
relationship of the state and civil society in Britain throws some light on
the peculiar form of public ownership, which all British governments,
Liberal, Conservative and Labour, assumed to be the right and proper, namely
the public corporation. There was nothing inherently socialist or democra-
tic about this form of nationalization. It did not, for instance, empower
employees or the public in any new way, as many post-war French public
enterprises sought to do, nor did it involve the wider communities they
served, in the manner of the Tennessee Valley Authority.30 The public cor-
poration may most plausibly be seen as yet another example of the way in
which the British state imitated and adapted organizational forms created
by civil society for its own purposes. Self-governing professions are public
corporations’ nearest organizational kin, and nationalization in Britain was
an attempt to transfer something of the then-admired professional form of
self-government to industrial and service settings. All of the British public
corporations were granted monopolies, and sheltered from market forces,
by being required only ‘to break even taking one year with another’, rather
than to make profits. They were expected to provide a service to the people
of Britain, not to conquer world markets. They were also given certain
vague moral goals in the public interest. The most explicit were those
expected of the BBC, which was required to ‘inform and educate’ the popu-
lation, and only then to ‘entertain’ it. In the others, the governing boards
were left to define the public interest, and were free to cross-subsidize their
activities as they saw fit in pursuit of it.31 After their appointment, the
members of their boards were, to a remarkable degree for public bodies,
allowed to be self-governing. Arrangements for subsequent parliamentary,
administrative or public accountability or scrutiny of their activities were
minimal, or non-existent. When things started to go downhill, new forms
of accountability had to be invented ad hoc, though the only form of
accountability which really mattered by then was that to their banker of
last resort, H.M. Treasury.
In the present context, however, their most important characteristic was
the requirement placed on them to adopt best practice in labour relations.
This meant that their boards gave free rein to the collective aspirations of
all kinds of staff, not only professional, semi-professional, white collar,

skilled, semi- and unskilled manual staff, but managerial staff as well. They
encouraged, even obliged, their employees to join the union or profes-
sional association appropriate to their occupation and status. They thus
became totally-organized enterprises, not as employees of the enterprise in
the Japanese manner, but in the traditional British manner as members of
occupations, or kindred groups of occupations. Every single occupation was
organized, and every single employee was encouraged to find the associa-
tion or union appropriate to their occupation. Even the chairmen of
nationalized enterprises formed their own little club or ‘trade union’ to
negotiate their pay and conditions with the government.32
The National Health Service may serve as an illustration of the outcome.
In 1979, when Dyson and Spary attempted to describe its collective bar-
gaining procedures, it had well over a million employees and had recog-
nized 43 associations and unions for collective bargaining purposes, which
covered all the professional, white collar and manual occupations in the
service.33 Their jurisdictions were not entirely settled. Shortly before Dyson
and Spary began their study, for instance, the consultants organized in the
Hospital Consultant Staff Association had merged with the Junior Hospital
Doctors Association to form the British Hospital Doctors Federation.
Alongside, and partly overlapping with these associations, was the British
Medical Association, which was itself a federation of occupational associa-
tions, internally divided into a series of so-called ‘craft committees’ for hos-
pital consultants, junior medical staff, general practitioners, which often
negotiated with each other, as well as with the Department of Health and
Social Security. Beneath these associations for doctors, there were more
than a dozen semi-professional associations for physiotherapists, radio-
graphers, midwives, health visitors, nurses and others, and then various
associations for managerial and administrative staff, including two multi-
occupational unions, the Association of Technical, Managerial and Super-
visory Staffs, the National Association of Local Government Officers, and a
number of others which catered for single occupations, such as the Guild
of Medical Secretaries.
At the top of the manual workers in the service, were a cluster of unions –
the lineal descendants of the original TUC ‘new model unions’ – represent-
ing the skilled electrical, engineering and building workers, and beneath
them four large multi-occupational unions, the National Union of Public
Employees, the Confederation of Health Service Employees, the Transport
and General Workers Union, and the General and Municipal Workers
Union. These were the lineal descendants of the ‘new’ unions and orga-
nized semi- and unskilled workers such as nursing auxiliaries, catering,
laundry and maintenance workers.
In such a dense, complex, self-organized network there was, of course, a
degree of overlap and dual membership, of friction and competition, of
movement and unresolved boundaries. The process of inventing, organiz-

ing and locating occupations in response to the growth of technology and
knowledge, which had been a central theme in British industrial history,
had not come to an end. Originally, surgeons and apothecaries had both
been manual occupations, but through the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies they both ascended – apothecaries assuming the name of general
practitioners – to become professions and core members of the middle
class. In the NHS in 1979, another example of this process was still unfold-
ing. Ambulance personnel had previously been recruited by the four multi-
occupational unions (NALGO, NUPE, COHSE, T & G), presumably because
they looked like van drivers, but these were being challenged by an out-
sider, which was not among the 43 recognized bodies, the Association of
Professional Ambulance Personnel. This association argued that unions had
failed to recognize or further the distinctive skills and collective interests of
ambulance personnel, and was trying to organize them as a profession. A
few years later it claimed to have recruited about 5,000 of the 17,000 engaged
in this kind of work, both manual and non-manual, from all levels of the
service other than chief and deputy chief.34
Public enterprise in Britain, it is clear, provided the perfect environment for
occupational organization, and occupational self-government. Although the
NHS looked new, indeed was new in certain respects, it remained internally
an extremely traditional form of organization. Ever since its formation, it had
augmented the professional autonomy of both medical practitioners and of
all its other employees. Public funding never entailed continuous managerial
supervision or lay intrusion and accountability. NHS consultants were able to
work in much the same manner as their nineteenth-century predecessors,
who donated their time to charitable hospitals, with the added advantage that
they were able to draw a regular salary while continuing with their private
practices. The NHS also settled the long-disputed division of labour between
consultants and general practitioners, rescued the latter from the unwelcome
supervision of friendly societies and insurance funds, and provided them both
with secure, non-competitive work jurisdictions. Judging by the Griffiths
report, which initiated Mrs Thatcher’s attempts to reform the NHS, many
other occupations, from top to bottom of the service, had established a similar
degree of corporate autonomy. In a widely quoted phrase, Griffiths suggested
that ‘if Florence Nightingale were carrying her lamp through the corridors of
the NHS today she would almost certainly be searching for the people in
charge.’35 He derided the unique form of ‘consensus management’ which had
emerged, and which required an input from elected representatives of every
significant occupation in the service. He compared it to ‘a “mobile”: designed
to move with any breath of air, but which in fact never changes its position,
and gives no clear indication of direction.’36
There is no reason to think that this corporately-organized internal struc-
ture was unique to the NHS. All nationalized industries were similarly
favourably disposed to unionization of their employees, and on the same

occupational basis.37 In a sense, they all might be said to have enabled both
professions and trade unions to realize their fundamental goals, that is, to
recruit all the members of their occupations, to maintain their practice-based
training arrangements, to establish their jurisdictions at the workplace, and to
establish a considerable degree of collective self-government within them.
Thus the notion that nationalization involved a transfer from private to
public ownership is somewhat misleading. Many of these enterprises were
transferred, under public auspices, from one form of private ownership to
another, that is, from the private ownership of individual shareholders to the
collective private ownership of well-organized occupational groups.
If we accept that organized occupations were also the constituent units of
classes, it becomes rather easy to explain why the labour relations of public
enterprises should be no better, and often worse, than those of private
industry, and why they were never thought to have mollified or lessened
class conflict. Their problems were due, not to the ‘capitalist sea’ around
them, but to the plethora of professional associations and trade unions
within them, which stabilized and institutionalized a hierarchy of organ-
ized occupations, thereby solidifying class consciousness and class dis-
tinctions, and facilitating strike action in defence of the collective interests
of any disgruntled occupation. Pay may have been their most common cause,
but they were also about relativities and status that had been disturbed,
precedents that were not respected, and aspirations that were not recog-
nized. They were, in other words, traditional trade disputes, which some-
times assumed a class colouration, rhetoric and form. The prelude to the
Thatcher era, ‘the winter of discontent’ of 1978–1979, was a simultaneous
revolt by numerous occupations in public services, including many from
the NHS, whose class consciousness had been aroused because they had all
simultaneously been subjected to government pay restraint during a period
of inflation. Trades then combined to provoke class action – English style.
How could class consciousness be combined with high rates of

mobility?
A fourth puzzle arises from the evidence of comparative rates of social mobility
presented at the very beginning of the investigation which showed that
England had higher rates of social mobility than some societies who con-
sidered themselves classless. How could this be? Common sense and long-
standing sociological wisdom alike suggest that class sentiments and class
solidarity derive from, and thrive on, low rates of mobility. Indeed, one sus-
pects that it was the persistence of class sentiment in Britain that led many
sociologists to assume that it must have a distinctively low rate of social
mobility, and to talk as though its rates of mobility were low, even after the
comparative evidence repeatedly suggested they were not.38
Few sociologists, it seems safe to say, have thought that class conscious-
ness might be combined with high rates of mobility, though 40 years ago,
Turner argued that the rate of mobility might be of no consequence one
way or the other, for even if the rates of social mobility in the United States
and England were exactly the same, the ‘sponsored’ form of mobility in
England, meaning mobility by grammar school selection at an early age,
socialized the upwardly mobile in the manners and behaviour of a different
class, while Americans were upwardly mobile merely as a result of an edu-
cational ‘contest’ continuously open to everyone and involving no such
class re-socialization. As a result, Americans were, in his view, less inclined
to think that they had left one class and entered another.39 More recently,
Savage raised the question whether class formation needed to be based on
‘a static attachment to a fixed position’ and considered the possibility that
class sentiment might survive despite high rates of mobility.40 Between
these two sceptical voices, however, the notion that class sentiments survived
because mobility was low was firmly entrenched in sociological wisdom.41
Before considering how the theory of class formation presented earlier
copes with this counter-intuitive combination of high rates of mobility and
strong class sentiment, it has to face up to a preliminary, tricky problem. If
England, as has been argued, had uniquely well-organized, self-governing
occupations, one probable consequence would be high rates of occupa-
tional inheritance, since well-organized occupations usually have well-
defended barriers to social mobility for unrelated or unconnected outsiders.
Cumulatively, such barriers should lead, ceteris paribus, to lower overall
rates of social mobility than in other countries. But the evidence we have
considered indicates that it didn’t.
A possible explanation is that the professions and manual occupations
were expanding at such a rate that even though they favoured self-recruit-
ment, there were plenty of opportunities for other entrants with no family
ties to an existing member, and that these opportunities combined with
others elsewhere in the economy, beyond the control of well-organized
professions and crafts, either through the educational system, or through
entrepreneurship, management, and other unorganized or newly-organized
occupations might have compensated, or more than compensated, for the
relative closure of the professions and skilled trades. Ishida’s comparative
study of Britain, Japan and the United States supports this explanation, for
while he confirmed that it was indeed ‘more difficult to enter ‘professional
(and petty bourgeoisie) and skilled work in Britain than in the other two
countries’, and that barriers to professional work contrasted particularly
sharply with the ‘weak self-recruitment’ and ‘openness of the professional
class’ in the U.S., he also found that overall Britain generally was a rather
mobile society when compared with both the U.S. and Japan.42 Other
avenues of mobility must therefore have compensated for the barriers to
mobility presented by professions and skilled workers on mobility, though
Ishida did not identify or examine them. Müller’s finding, mentioned earlier,
that Britain had the most open university system in Europe, is one possibility.
Granick’s evidence on the very high rate of mobility from English factory
floors into management is another.43
For want of evidence we can say no more on this preliminary puzzle, and
answering the main test question – how could England have had more
class solidarity than elsewhere when it also had comparatively high rates of
mobility? – soon runs into similar difficulties. Nevertheless, one can suggest
a possible answer with the help of Whittaker’s studies of nine British and
nine Japanese machine tool plants in the late 1980s. At one point, he
focused on the relationship between the machine tool operators and the
draughtsmen or programmers who wrote the programs for their machines,
a crucial relationship in the present context, since it crosses the collar and
class line. He found that virtually all the British programmers were former
operators who had been promoted from the shopfloor, while only one of
the nine Japanese plants promoted any of the programmers from the
shopfloor – a finding that is entirely consistent with the studies mentioned
earlier showing the higher rate of mobility in Britain from the shopfloor
than in Japan. However, Whittaker also found that, in Britain, the two
occupations, operators and programmers, had a marked ‘Us’ and ‘Them’
attitude towards one another, while the Japanese did not. One of Whittaker’s
operator informants in Britain told him – ‘Most of the one’s who’ve gone
over were useless on machines. Sometimes I think that’s all they wanted to
do – go over into a white collar job. It’s definitely an Us and Them situ-
ation.’44 Here then is a specific instance of the counter-intuitive phenom-
enon under examination, namely, higher, much higher, rates of mobility
in Britain combined with a greater sense of antagonism between ‘Us’
and ‘Them’.45 How can this be explained in terms consistent with our
theory?
We may begin by recalling that we have argued that occupations in
Britain had a greater degree of solidarity than occupations elsewhere, and
that trade or occupation long remained the fundamental principle of union
organization however ‘general’ or ‘industrial’ the union might appear to be.
We may therefore infer that a British workers’ identity was more likely to
be closely tied to membership of an occupation than their Japanese coun-
terparts, whose company-based solidarity is legendary. The ‘Us’ and ‘Them’
stereotypes and antagonism are therefore, we may suggest, the corollary of
this stronger occupational group affiliation and loyalty. However, since
many, indeed virtually all, of the British programmers were ex-operators, we
must also infer that their original occupational identities were not indelible,
and that once promoted to programmers they were effectively re-socialized
in membership of their new occupation, and came to think of themselves as
programmers, hence enabling their ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ attitudes to be combined
with high rates of mobility.
This stretches one’s credulity a little. No one doubts the socializing power
of the practice-based training of the established professions, which routinely
change accents, dress, manners, values and lifestyle of their new entrants. ‘Cor
blimey barristers and doctors are hard to find. But that is initial career entry
socialization into established professions. In this instance, we are referring
to numerous mid-career transfers into the then rather new occupation of
computer programmers. The idea that this occupation could re-socialize mid-
career entrants to consider themselves as ‘Us’, and their former colleagues as
‘Them’, is an altogether more astonishing phenomenon. Whittaker’s field
studies referred, however, only to a single industry, and we do not have
enough studies of similar mid-career mobility across collar and class lines
to know how common such re-socialization may be, or under what con-
ditions it might leave class distinctions intact, as in the case of these pro-
grammers, and in what conditions it might erase them.
The theory cannot therefore be said to have passed this fourth test, though
it did not fail it either. There is simply insufficient comparative evidence.
Wright’s data showing that Sweden had both higher social mobility and
higher class consciousness than the United States points in the same direc-
tion, and suggests that trade unions or professional associations were engaged
in the class re-socialization of adults, but this was one of ‘anomalies’ that he
declined to explore.46
Why did classes in England form a unique system?
When comparing American and British responses to questionnaires that asked

respondents to identify their own class, we have observed that researchers
could, by presenting a fixed choice, make Americans describe themselves as
working class even though, left to themselves, they seldom described them-
selves as such. No researcher has ever sought to discover whether we might
also force them to refer to the American ‘class system’, though the term
long came spontaneously and frequently to the lips of the English. They
used it without, however, feeling any need to explain what was systemic
about their classes. One guesses that they felt it was ‘a system’ because
classes had a certain comprehensiveness, symmetry and stability, and they
could therefore place most people relative to it.
Sociologists have also often used the term ‘class system’, though similarly
without ever trying to identify its systemic properties. Marxists might
perhaps claim they do so, since they suppose that everyone would, eventu-
ally, to belong to one or other of two main classes, and that these would be
locked in a perpetual class struggle, which is certainly a system of a sort,
albeit only an imaginary one. Empirical research which makes use of occu-
pational prestige scales also conveys a sense of a national system, since
every occupation is conscientiously given an ordinal position, and sub-
sequently a class position. This can hardly be said, however, to explain
what is systemic about the class system, since the inclusion of every occu-
pation, and everyone somewhere or other is simply a product of the way
sociologists have chosen to rank and categorize occupations. This class
system is a figment of sociologists’ imagination, created with the stroke of a
pen or computer key. Can this explanation, which claims to have identified
political events which allowed civil society to create the institutional struc-
tures on which real classes have long depended, do any better? This is its
final test.
It has the best chance of doing so, if it considers the system from a dis-
tance and over the long run, and identifies characteristics shared by the
aristocracy during its long decline, and by the contemporaneously expand-
ing and organizing middle and working classes. There are five.
The first is the common, rather ancient, point of origin of the three main
classes. Although they began to form at differing periods of medieval and
post-medieval history, their modern forms all critically depended on events
in the winter of 1688–1689, which simultaneously halted royal or state
regulation and interference in the affairs of Parliament and local govern-
ment, in the government of the professions and of city companies, and
authoritatively settled the relationship between the state and civil society
on which all three classes subsequently depended. Ancient corporate forms
were able to become modern classes because of these revolutionary events.
The second characteristic is that all three classes, each in their own time,
organized their own national corporate ‘headquarters’: Parliament itself long
being that of the aristocracy and gentry, professional bodies being that of
the middle class, while ‘new model’ unions, the Trade Unions Congress
and later the Labour Party were that of the working class. Each are, it may
be noted, among the oldest forms of organizations of their kind in the world,
if not the oldest, and all have remained in continuous existence ever since
their formation. Class distinctions therefore have peculiarly deep roots in
the experience of the English people, and the longevity and co-existence of
all three ‘headquarter’ institutions not only suggests that their class system
was unique, but also that the three classes were compatible as a system.
The three classes also resembled one another, in that their corporate
activities long remained, for the most part, outside the law, a third systemic
characteristic. The privileges of the ruling aristocracy and gentry were
dependent on an unwritten constitution, while those of the middle class
centred on the rights, privileges and immunities granted to professions.
Those of the barristers’ inns of court remained, like those of Parliament,
entirely unwritten, while those of the other professions rested on charters,
but these were for the most part loosely-worded, and seldom, if ever, liti-
gated.47 The main corporate bodies of the working class, trade unions,
were similarly organized outside the law, initially because magistrates long
tended to turn a blind eye towards the journeymen’s societies, and later
by the ‘immunities’ granted by the state, which, apart from occasional
interruptions by the courts, were accepted by employers, and apparently by

public opinion.
Although the three classes had this fundamental extra-legal characteristic
in common, the nature of their relationships with the state, as we have
already observed, differed greatly: the aristocracy’s was personal, that of the
middle class was handled by those who could plausibly claim to be repre-
sentatives of the practitioners of a single profession, while that of the
working class was handled by representatives of many occupations acting
in concert, en masse, or even as a class. The three classes therefore had their
own distinct histories. The personal relationships of aristocracy and gentry
were interrupted, and eventually destroyed, by the advent of parliamentary
democracy, by the creation of political parties, and the organization of
local government, though vestiges of the personal nature of this relation-
ship could still be observed in 2002/3 when the Blair government was
removing most of the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords.
The state’s relationship with the professions, the organized core of the
middle class, was relatively tranquil, though they were the subject of occa-
sional parliamentary criticism, and legislation was not always what a par-
ticular profession requested. They were, however, seldom subjected to
legislation or regulation of which they altogether disapproved, until that is,
the Thatcher era, when the rights of their representative governing bodies
were suddenly overruled, in the name of the representative government of
the entire nation, but this will be discussed later.
The interruptions of the trade unions’ activities were more serious, and
some have already been mentioned: the numerous combination laws in
the eighteenth century against specific trades in specific cities, and then
the general Combination Laws of 1799–1824, prompted by the fear that the
French Revolution might spread to England. Thanks to the Glorious
Revolution, however, there was no state machinery by which these laws
could be enforced effectively, and enforcement largely depended on private
prosecutions by employers, which were cumbersome, costly, unpredictable,
and therefore rare.48 These laws did not, moreover, have much affect on
collective association amongst workers since some union activities, such as
the national campaign to lobby Parliament between 1812–1814 remained
perfectly legal.49 Trade unions’ activities were again interrupted, as we have
seen, by the surprising Taff Vale decision in 1901, until that was reversed
by Parliament in 1906. They then continued to enjoy their immunities
until their temporary suspension by the legislation of the Heath govern-
ment in 1971, but these were restored in 1974, and only finally terminated
by the Thatcher Government’s Industrial Relations Act in 1982.
The fourth systemic characteristic of English classes was that members of
all three classes were property owners, though the nature of their property,
and their title to it, varied. The aristocracy’s was the simplest, and most
familiar, being a legal title to the possession and use of land and other
property, with or without conditions attached. Many members of the pro-

fessions were freehold property owners in exactly the same sense, but as
members of a profession they claimed possession of another kind of prop-
erty, a work territory or jurisdiction to which they were entitled as a result
of the efforts of their predecessors who had created it and bequeathed it to
them. Their charters, one might add, seldom defined this intellectual property
precisely, and its boundaries therefore often had to be defended by the vigi-
lance of their members against trespassers and other claimants. Members of
the middle class, one might therefore say, were property owners in two senses,
privately in the simple, physical sense with freehold title, and in an intellec-
tual sense with a collective title.
Until quite recent times, most skilled workers owned property only of this
second intellectual type, the collective property of their trade or mystery. The
campaigners for the re-enactment of the Elizabethan Statute in 1812–1814
eloquently put the case for statutory recognition of it. ‘The apprenticed arti-
sans have collectively and individually, an unquestionable right to expect the
most extended protection from the Legislature, in the quiet and exclusive use
and enjoyment of their respective arts and trades, which the law has already
conferred upon them as a property, as much as it has secured the property of
the stockholder in the public funds: and it is clearly unjust to take away the
whole of the ancient established property and rights of any one class of the
community, unless, at the same time, the rights and property of the whole
commonwealth should be dissolved, and parcelled out anew for the public
good.’50 This compelling argument fell on deaf ears, and skilled workers’ col-
lective property never therefore received any legal recognition. Thereafter, it
was sometimes contested by employers, and liable to be obliterated by the
random strokes of technological innovations. It was therefore much the most
insecure title of the three, and social scientists have often been inclined to
ignore it altogether. However, the evidence presented earlier comparing
English workplaces with those of other countries suggests that employers and
managers were less inclined to do so, and that without any help from the law
or from charters, many, many groups of English workers successfully estab-
lished and enforced their collective property rights.51
Their fifth and final shared, systemic characteristic of the three classes
was by far the most important: they each had their own notions and codes
of honour. Without reference to such notions, it is difficult to explain how
class loyalties and obligations could have been passed from one generation
to another, or how they could inform the lives and manners of the English
people for so long. If class sentiments had rested merely on economic self-
interest, as many class theories suggest, the collective institutions of all
three classes would surely have disintegrated in apathy or disarray, rather
like trade associations, as the economic prospects of one segment of their
membership diverged from those of another. But as we have already observed,
they didn’t. They continued over immense periods of time, during which they
defined the English social and political landscape. One may therefore infer
that they each instilled in their members the sense of loyalty and obligation
that enabled them to endure as a system. Orwell, somewhat grudgingly per-
haps, admitted that classes had a moral dimension. ‘The essential point about
the English class system’, he observed, ‘is that it is not entirely explicable in
terms of money, and it is useless to say that the middle class are “snobbish”
and leave it at that. You get no further if you do not realize that snobbish-
ness is bound up with a species of idealism….’52
The ‘species of idealism’ that sustained each class was embodied in their
codes of honour. That of the aristocracy is probably the best known, since
it became the stuff of historical legend and romance, of poetry, novels,
movies and television dramas. It was bound up with a family name and
estate, entailed obligations to a surrounding community, or public service
at the national level, and a disdain for certain kinds of work deemed dis-
honourable, especially trade. No doubt it included a fair amount of flummery,
make-believe and trivial matters of precedence, though the aristocracy is
hardly alone in these respects. Sometimes it was for real, and involved the
highest stakes. Lord Cardigan did actually lead the Light Brigade into the
Valley of Death, and since we know that a large number of sons of the aristo-
cracy died in World War I, we may infer that a good number accepted the
obligations of their rank rather than using it to shirk the risks and dangers
to which their dependents and inferiors were exposed.53 The aristocratic
code of honour is probably easier to recognize than that of other classes
precisely because it has, over such a long period, been passing into history,
and it therefore seems quaint, curious and anachronistic. One reason, one
may add, why it is difficult to recognize the various elites that displaced
them as a class is that they appear to be driven more by career imperatives
than by any equally recognizable and distinctive code of honour that
might have united them as a class.
The codes of middle and working class honour both outlived those of the
aristocracy. Middle-class codes of honour were enshrined in professional
rules of etiquette or ethics, often remained unwritten, and were therefore
rather exclusive, arcane and sometimes incomprehensible. Even their own
clients, relatives and friends often failed to understand them, and some-
times still do. Why, for instance, should barristers, as a matter of honour,
have declined to be retained directly by their clients, or be reluctant even
to speak to them, except in the presence of their solicitor? Why should pro-
fessionals prefer not to enter multi-disciplinary partnerships, or not to hear
criticisms of colleagues from their clients, or hesitate to discuss their fees?
Outsiders have always been rather sceptical and dismissive of these notions
of honour, and inclined to sympathize with Lord Melbourne’s comment ‘I
don’t like the middle class. The higher and lower classes, there’s some good
in them, but the middle classes are all affectation and conceit, and pretence
and concealment.’54 Professionals nonetheless continue to this day to spell
out conscientiously how every member of their profession ought to behave,

frequently at some cost of their economic or career prospects, and there do
not seem to be any reasonable grounds for dismissing their efforts, as many
critics and social theorists have done, as mere ‘affectation and conceit and
pretence’ rather than a code of honour.55
The codes of honour of trade unions and of the working class have received
least public recognition, and even more surprisingly, academic recognition.
Indeed in their case the gap in comprehension reached Grand Canyon pro-
portions. They were commonly expressed in strike action, though since
the days lost through strikes in 2005–2006 were the lowest since figures
were first recorded, one has to cast one’s mind back to the 1960s, 1970s
and 1980s. Employers who then faced sympathy strikes, or journalists and
academics who editorialized about the crippling economic effects of demarca-
tion and jurisdictional disputes, or politicians who were trying to resolve a
labour dispute that hinged on ‘a point of principle’, were more inclined to
see short-sighted, pig-headed selfish intransigence, rather than any sense of
honour. Even historians and sociologists committed to the study of class
formation and class struggle seldom pay much attention to them, though
one imagines that it was only the self-sacrifice, altruism and courage of
working people fighting for their rights which inspired them to write their
books in the first place.56 The honour of their worker-subjects, however,
remains sub-text. There is no theory of class of which self-sacrifice, courage
and honour are integral parts. Class solidarity is supposed to arise from
common economic interests, and class struggle supposed to be in response
to economic exploitation. Such notions have obscured the sense of honour
that was commonly involved.
There are, however, episodes in the history of labour relations when money
or employment was plainly not at issue, and a sense of honour provides
much the most plausible explanation of workers’ behaviour. A number
of examples of such actions occurred during World War II, when fear of
unemployment could hardly have been great.57 Parker thought about half
of the 2,200 reported stoppages during the war involved wage disputes, and
attributed the other half to ‘dissatisfaction with working arrangements, dis-
ciplinary decisions or disputes about the type of tradesmen to be employed on
particular jobs.’ Although collectively-agreed ‘Relaxation of Customs
Agreements’ allowed employers to reorganize skilled work until the cessa-
tion of hostilities, and although disputes were subject to compulsory arbi-
tration, some skilled workers nonetheless responded to any perceived
threat to their trade, much as if they were its wartime custodians, fighting
on behalf of colleagues serving in the armed forces. In August 1944, for
example, 2,000 engineering operatives in Glasgow came out on strike to
support their demand for the dismissal of one employee who had not
served an apprenticeship. In November 1944, boilermakers in several ship-
yards came out on strike against the use of an imported American ‘plane
burner’ by semi-skilled workers, claiming that, as a ‘burning tool’, it pro-

perly belonged to their members. They refused to handle the work com-
pleted by the semi-skilled workers to whom some Tyneside employers had
assigned jobs using this machine.58 Given the importance of their work for
the invasion of Europe still in progress, the First Lord of the Admiralty
intervened to try and persuade the men to return to work. His appeal was
ignored, and the government eventually decided to force the 136 men
directly involved by legal action. When proceedings opened, 4,500 boiler-
makers came out on strike in sympathy with their colleagues. The dispute was
finally settled some two months later, in mid-January 1945. Other people’s
honour, however, is rarely comprehensible, often damnably inconvenient,
seldom more so, one imagines, than in this instance.
These wartime examples, however, may be considered instances pri-
marily as defences of the honour and collective property, of a trade rather
than of a class. But in England the honour of one trade commonly entailed
sympathy for that of another, and this mutual respect was the foundation
not only of its unified trade union movement but also of the solidarity of
the working class as a whole. Flanders’ study of the productivity nego-
tiations at an English oil refinery, conducted in the late 1950s and early
1960s, showed how trade and class honour were inextricably interwoven.59
At the centre of his account were seven skilled worker unions, six of
which had well-defined, customary jurisdictions. As a result, some of them
declined to accept any face-to-face orders from managers, or from anyone
not of their trade, and managers were therefore obliged to make ‘requests’
to their charge hands, much as if they were dealing with independent con-
tractors. This is, of course, one further instance, in an advanced tech-
nological work setting in the mid-twentieth century, of the claim made
repeatedly by workers in the earliest days of the industrial revolution who
had, as we have already observed, often behaved as if they were self-employed
professionals.60 Those early factory workers were, in their turn, only uphold-
ing the claim made by small masters and journeymen of the companies of
the City of London between 1649–1660, that no outsider or ‘stranger’ could
have any standing or authority in trade matters. Esso’s refinery managers
were mid-twentieth-century ‘strangers’.
Since the skilled unions at the refinery had declined to recruit any white
collar workers, they had necessarily created a class division between blue
collar workers and white collar staff and management. This became still
more marked when they came together to ‘face’ management collectively
in the negotiations about the proposed productivity agreement which was
intended to change many of their traditional working practices and was the
main subject of Flanders’ study. In this context, they instantly forgot all of
the issues that had provoked friction between them in the past, and toge-
ther formed a craft union council, whose chairmanship rotated amongst
the seven.61 They also united with the much larger number of semi- and
unskilled workers organized by the Transport and General Workers Union.

The ‘working class’ at the refinery was therefore internally stratified, and
separately organized, but united when they faced management, and even
though some of management’s proposals were intended to divide the workers
by offering financial benefits to some at the expense of others, their unions
never broke ranks.62 Class membership evidently had obligations, and when
facing management at least, the semi- and unskilled workers accepted them,
and rejected management proposals that would have been in their own
economic interest.
Management’s main aim was to control the division of labour at the
refinery by introducing multi-craft supervision, multi-craft flexibility, and
by installing meritocratic promotion ladders, so that ‘mates’ could be pro-
moted to skilled worker status. In most respects, they failed. In the early
stages, it became clear that the craft unions would not relax any of their
demarcation rules despite generous financial incentives and guarantees of
job security. Union negotiators encountered a hostile reception from their
members for even taking part in negotiations on this subject. Curiously,
the strongest resistance came from the welders who were the most insecure
and poorest-organized of the trades at the refinery. In many industries,
they were not recognized as a skilled trade at all, and at the refinery they
had no union of their own, and were scattered among three of the seven
craft unions. Even though some of the other craft workers could easily
perform their work, and some had been specifically trained to do so, their
negotiators nevertheless made only the most trivial concessions in this
area, in evident sympathy for the rights of their struggling, fellow crafts-
men. For a trial period only, the other craft workers agreed they ‘might
heat, cut, chamfer pipes and use the Mueller machine during periods of
shutdown.’ However, they insisted that before doing this, the welders’ shop
steward would, on every occasion, have to be consulted, a point of etiquette
worthy of the inns of court.
When management continued to push for more inter-craft flexibility in
subsequent negotiations, it provoked still more hostility, expressed in over-
time bans, a work-to-rule, and several mass meetings. Management’s offer of a
hefty wage increase, in return for increased flexibility during shutdown, pro-
voked considerable resentment among craftsmen. The curious feature of their
stand, Flanders observed, was that, in practice, craftsmen often accepted inter-
craft flexibility during shutdowns of their own free will. They also permitted
some flexibility to help supervisors whom they liked and respected, ‘to reward
“good” supervisors’ as one of them put it. However, flexibility of their own
free will was one thing, being forced to do it, and being offered money to
persuade them to accept managers’ right to tell them when to do it, was
evidently something else, something dishonourable.
During the negotiations the realization that these workers had a sense of
obligation to other workers, unnamed and unknown, and not employees of
the refinery, slowly dawned on one manager. Thinking out loud to his col-
leagues, he remarked, ‘Supposing in a firm demarcation was relaxed, and
it meant that the same number of people went further. That firm then
expanded and might take on less new labour … for the other man who
failed to get a job, it would be bad. So it was not right to say that less
demarcation would be bad “for us”. It would be bad only in so far as
we were part of the man who did not get the job. Putting it another way,
demarcation rules were insisted upon in order to get a job for another man.
If that was the case, it should be made clear … Demarcation was only of
benefit to another person who was not involved in the situation.’63 This
manager had evidently seldom contemplated acting for the benefit of ano-
ther person who was ‘not involved in the situation’, but skilled workers
routinely did so. They clearly felt obligations to fellow members of their
trades working in other companies, even to those who had retired from it,
and even perhaps to those who were still to enter it.
The idea that mates might advance to skilled status was rejected by
craftsmen out of hand. Even though they worked with craftsmen every
minute of the day, mates had not ‘served their time’ and that was the end
of it, a decision that mates apparently accepted without complaint. Oddly
enough, management was, however, able to obtain the skilled unions’ agree-
ment to phase out mates altogether, though only out in return for guaran-
tees of increased employment of members of their own trades in the future,
and on condition that it never entailed either compulsory redundancy for
their mates or any upgrading, even if mates were suitably trained.64 In this
instance, therefore, the interests of persons ‘not involved in the situation’,
that is members of the six trades elsewhere, were clearly compelling, and
took precedence over those who were rather more ‘involved’, their mates,
though the interests of the latter were not entirely ignored.
Management tended to assume, as anyone would, that since semi- and
unskilled workers were not distinguished by their trades, and all belonged
to the same union, they would be easier to deal with. However, the dif-
fusion of trade ideals, the process of inventing quasi-crafts among semi-
and unskilled workers, which had been an integral part of the creation
of the English working class, was evidently still continuing during these
negotiations. One example of several emerged towards the end of the nego-
tiations, when attention turned to the least skilled workers in the refinery.
Management rather casually proposed to assign them all, at higher rates of
pay, to four new categories, by far the largest of which was that of ‘cleaner-
labourer’. As the name suggests, this was to include several different kinds
of existing cleaners along with labourers. The cleaners, however, deeply
resented the idea that they should perform all kinds of cleaning work, and
that they should be merged with labourers. Whatever management might
have thought, they saw themselves as divided into three distinct occu-
pations: mechanical cleaners who considered themselves the aristocrats of
the non-craft world and declined to work with the tank cleaners, who for
their part looked down on the general cleaners, who in turn distinguished
themselves from mere labourers. The idea that cleaners could invest mean-
ing and honour in a trivial distinction between two kinds of non-skilled
work had evidently never crossed the managers’ minds, but they were forced
to acknowledge it since the resentment of all three groups was one of the
factors that led the Day Branch of the Transport and General to vote
against their proposals as a whole.
The mechanical and tank cleaners’ sense of honour rested on the tiniest
sliver of expertise, so tiny that it had not even been noticed by managers
rearranging work assignments. At first glance, it is hardly to be compared
with that of the skilled workers, let alone with the etiquette or codes of ethics
of professionals, while the sense of honour of proud aristocrats’ stately homes
set in rolling acres is of another world. But were they in the end so very dif-
ferent? Was there not a common thread of honour running through them
all? And was it not this common thread that made these three classes parts
of an enduring and integrated class system?
10
A Brief Reply to Orwell
Having traced the way in which classes emerged, flourished, and formed a
system in England up to 1979 in a manner which enables us to distinguish
them clearly from the classes of Russia, France and the United States, and
having tested this version of events, as best we might, by providing plaus-
ible answers to FAQs about their peculiarities, we may at long last turn to
answer Orwell directly. Perhaps I may do so in the conversational manner
in which he first made his claim.
Well, Eric, we must first observe that we haven’t looked at every other
country, so we still cannot say whether England was ‘the most class-ridden
country under the sun’ or not. However, we have collected evidence of classes
in three other societies, and though experts on each of them would doubt-
less say we have merely skimmed the surface of it, it seems sufficient to draw
some conclusions, and to respond to your assertion.
Now and then you suggested that classes sprang from inequalities of wealth,
income and opportunity, but I did not take that to be your considered view.
It is in any event a poor argument, and gives us no reason to think England
was any more class-ridden than anywhere else. Inequalities of wealth in
England were, it is true, still massive when you were born, but they declined
continuously throughout your lifetime, and ended up no greater, and prob-
ably less than those in the United States. Income inequalities also fell con-
tinuously, making England one of the more egalitarian capitalist societies.
Inequalities of opportunity also seem to have been no greater than those in
many other societies, and by some measure were considerably less. In par-
ticular, manual workers in England had greater chances of rising from the
shopfloor into management than workers elsewhere.
However, I infer from your remarks about the way class had shaped your
own identity that you considered class as something far more deeply embed-
ded in English psyche and culture than mere differences in income levels,
as something ubiquitous and inescapable, a constant, pervasive, and pre-
dictable point of reference in English lives, so that a great many of their insti-
tutions were defined by it, and a great many, perhaps all, of their personal
304
A Brief Reply to Orwell 305
relationships coloured by it. If this is what you meant by class-ridden, you

were on far stronger ground, and the English evidence we have examined
suggests you were right. The other three societies have had fewer enduring
and definable classes, and they never constituted a ubiquitous system com-
parable to that of English classes.
While several classes formed or began to form in Russia towards the end
of the old regime, it seems to have had only one enduring class, and that
was a forerunner of the ruling class that you observed during its Soviet
prime, and which appears to have continued after the fall of the Soviet
regime. Numerous classes have emerged in France. Its working class has
long dominated public perceptions and discussions of class, but beyond its
heroic struggles on the streets of Paris and other cities there must be some
doubt whether it has ever been a permanent associational or institutional
presence in the ordinary lives of French workers. It certainly never formed
part of a durable system because the middle class never created an enduring
set of institutions that permanently distinguished their way of life and their
manners from those of the working class. Indeed many of those in non-
manual and professional occupations who might have affiliated with the
middle class preferred to identify with the working class, during its ecstatic
moments of protest at least. They formed their own classes amongst them-
selves only in relatively recent times and when the working class had already
passed its high point. In the United States we could only find pockets of class
and intermittent surges of working class solidarity and consciousness. Most of
the time most Americans seem to have thought, as they still think, that they
belong to the middle class, which has no distinctive class institutions and is
not easy to distinguish from any class that might be either above or below it.
In England, by contrast, we found three enduring, organized and perva-
sive classes. We had little difficulty in identifying the distinctive corporate
institutions of each of them, along with their distinctive, codes of honour.
They did not rise and fall simultaneously – the aristocracy had already begun
its long decline when the ascent of the middle and working classes com-
menced, but aristocratic institutions, titles and its manners nonetheless
continued long enough to allow new elites to be assimilated into it, and
to enable England’s classes to form more of a coherent system than those
in the other three countries. Until 1979 at least, England might therefore
reasonably be said to have been, as you put it, ‘more class-ridden’.
But why? You didn’t say why, and left only a few cryptic clues. Your account
of how Napoleon and Snowball established the rule of the pigs at Animal
Farm was one, and the stratification of Oceania in 1984 between inner and
ordinary party members and proles might have been another, for you strongly
implied that political power was decisive in institutionalizing class dis-
tinctions, rather than the market forces. You also pointed out that the tra-
ditions of the England’s upper middle class ‘were not to any extent commercial
but mainly military, official and professional’, and therefore suggested that
their relationship with the state, and political events and decisions were
more important than their place in the market.
In all four societies we found support for this idea. Political events and
decisions affected those who actively created and organized classes and the
organized collectivities that brought them together, held them together,
and disseminated their ‘sense of honour’, their distinctive notions of ‘good
and evil’, and of the ‘pleasant and unpleasant’. Market forces usually seem,
if anything, to have been undermining them, an idea you hinted at in 1984.
Only proles, you told us, dealt on the free market. If they were to endure
and pass on their values and institutions from one generation to the next,
classes required organized social support. The evidence we examined sug-
gests that they got much more of it in England, primarily as a result of a
distinctive, long-established relationship between the state and civil society
which allowed organized interests in civil society greater freedom than else-
where to run their own affairs. As they did so, they constructed and main-
tained their classes.
The roots of this distinctive relationship between the state and civil society
might be traced back a long way, to the very beginnings of the formation
of the English state after the Norman Conquest, and it evolved over cen-
turies without being greatly altered or disturbed by revolution, by indus-
trialization, by mass democracy, or even by the socialist policies of the Labour
government that you witnessed. For want of a better term, we called it laissez
gouverner. The aristocracy pioneered and defended it, and for a long time
were the only ones to benefit from it. Having definitively secured their cor-
porate rights against royal intervention during the Glorious Revolution,
they were able to use Parliament as a club where they could discuss, define
and protect their own class interests. Much later on, they were, as you know,
slowly and painlessly displaced by the representatives of other classes. You did
not live to see the completion of this process. It still isn’t quite over.
The less commonly observed fact, however, is that the middle class, and
eventually the working class, also benefited from this revolution, for though
both of them only emerged in large numbers later on, as a result of indus-
trialization, their first corporate institutions were alive and well during it.
Over time, the aristocrat-dominated Parliament took a rather benign, laissez
gouverner attitude towards them. Barristers were left to govern themselves in
their inns of court, physicians in their Royal College, and the host of other
newly-organized non-manual occupations that emerged in the eighteenth,
nineteenth and twentieth centuries were granted similar self-governing
powers. As these professions imitated one another, they tacitly recognized a
certain parity and solidarity amongst themselves, and their etiquette, ethics
and manners cumulatively defined not just an upper middle class as you
thought, but to varying degrees the entire middle class, since dozens of
other non-manual occupations followed in their footsteps, formed similar
corporate institutions, harboured similar aspirations and pretensions, and
similarly sought to distinguish themselves from their inferiors, and especially

those performing manual labour. In so doing they cumulatively erected class
distinctions and barriers that all English people came to learn and live by.
Their ‘inferiors’ meanwhile, after escaping from the control of their guild
masters, organized independently and extensively as journeymen societies.
Since Parliament declined to recognize and protect them in the same way
as the professions, and the courts often treated their attempts to enforce
their corporate rights as conspiracies, they long remained informal and local.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, their trade union
successors finally benefited from laissez gouverner, were formally granted
legal immunities comparable to those of the professions, and went on to
organize a considerable proportion of workers, both industrially and polit-
ically, as a class. Both before and after this legal recognition, English
employers came, with varying degrees of willingness, to accept the rules
workers themselves devised and enforced in their workplaces. English
workers therefore obtained a degree of de facto self-government in their
workplaces much greater than that of their counterparts in the other three
countries. This self-government was the foundation of their class solidarity
and helped to institutionalize class distinctions firmly and extensively.
Both the middle and working classes of England were therefore founded
on the voluntary but strong and enduring workplace associations of profes-
sions and trades. Both kinds of association were able to control the training
of their new recruits and therefore able to socialize them in the manners
and codes of honour appropriate to their class. Both were also able to col-
lectively shape and police the division of labour around them, and could
therefore define and uphold class distinctions in their daily work routines.
Since both formed national associations, they carried such distinctions
across the length and breadth of the country. Not everyone belonged to
one or other kind of association of course; indeed a majority of non-
manual and manual workers belonged to neither, but the visibility of their
corporate institutions ensured that everyone in England could place them-
selves relative to them. Whenever any group of English workers, non-
manual or manual, organized to defend their common interests they almost
invariably followed in the path of one or the other, though a few white
collar occupations were never quite sure which model they ought to
follow.
None of the other three states we have considered were so obliging to
organized interests in their civil societies, so their landowners, professions
and trades never had similar opportunities to contribute to the formation
of classes. Inspired by their revolutionary ideals, all three of these societies
prevented landowners forming a hereditary aristocracy, and though one
was revived and lingered for a while in France, that is obviously one class
that was unique to the English. In Soviet Russia, there could, as you real-
ized, be no classes other than the ‘inner party’ or nomenklatura since no
interests in civil society were allowed to organize. There were, therefore,

only official categories, or ‘non-antagonistic’ classes, as the regime called
them, which were not really classes at all having no institutions or voice of
their own. Five classes emerged in France, and one relied, like the nomen-
klatura, on its position within the state. None of the other four, however,
have had an enduring organized base in civil society comparable to that of
English classes.
Classes in the United States have similarly lacked any enduring organized
base in civil society. Early state governments, and the federal government,
were reluctant to support institutions, or grant privileges or benefits which
might have helped organized interests in civil society to form classes. Higher
educational institutions were one outstanding example. They were market-
driven and market-differentiated at a relatively early point, rather than
state-sponsored and could offer opportunities for individual betterment to
an ever-expanding proportion of the population, which as time passed far
outshone the appeal of collective betterment offered by an organized working
class. Moreover, while sympathetic to almost every kind of voluntary asso-
ciation, the American governments would not tolerate those that exercised
powers that infringed the constitutional rights of non-members. Hence the
early state legislatures refused to allow exclusive English-style self-governing
professions to continue. On similar grounds, they also got rid of lifetime
career civil servants. The federal government copied them, and later outlawed
regulatory trade associations. Corporate groups that might have contributed
to the formation of a middle class of professionals and businessmen were
therefore weakened or disappeared. Skilled worker unions were left to fend
for themselves, but against aggressive employers, who were, in sharp con-
trast to their English counterparts, fortified by a deep conviction that the
jurisdictional and self-governing claims of these unions infringed their con-
stitutional rights as private property owners. For about 15 years, from 1932
to 1947, the federal government provided unions with legal protection resem-
bling that which English trade unions had long enjoyed, and during that
period American workers came as close as they ever came to forming a
class. But the federal government, ostensibly to protect their rights, also
entangled them in complex legal procedures, and reserved for itself the
right to decide the basis on which workers should be allowed to organize
and negotiate. The working class then disappeared, even from its strong-
hold in New York City.
In all three of these societies, therefore, political decisions prevented classes
building on the solidarity, loyalty and proprietorial interests that well-
organized professions and trades commonly generate. In England, these
were the citadels of the middle and working classes. They were also their
schools, passing on to their new entrants through the practice-based
and practitioner-controlled training they maintained, the values, manners
and distinctive codes of honour of their respective classes, and providing
permanent points of reference and aspiration for less organized and still
unorganized occupations. In the other three societies, organized occu-
pations were neither citadels nor schools. They did not constitute enduring
self-governing associations that controlled the admission or training of
newcomers. Nor were they able to regulate the division of labour at their
workplaces, which was more likely to be determined by the state, or by
employers and managers, which meant it was more responsive to market
forces. They therefore had less opportunity to demarcate and reiterate class
distinctions during their daily work routines. Hence the classes that have
emerged in these societies have tended to be partial, ephemeral and asym-
metrical, rather than parts of a stable all-embracing class system. They
lacked both the historical continuity and ubiquitous coverage of those in
England, and therefore made fewer couplings and affiliations with insti-
tutions beyond the workplace.
In brief, Eric, this is how I would explain why the English have been
more ‘class-ridden’ than the Russians, French and Americans. My explana-
tion is, you will no doubt have noticed, not without its ironies, for it turns
out that English freedom and the English class system were intimately related,
indeed two sides of the same coin. As they were securing their freedom and
their self-government, the English were also constructing their classes.
You were, at the end of the day, rather ambivalent about what you called
‘this class breaking business’, describing it as ‘a wild ride into the darkness’.
I am not quite sure, therefore, how you will greet the news that, over the
past 25 years or so, England’s unique class formations have begun to crumble,
a process that began in 1979, which is why we stopped the preceding inves-
tigations at that point. But that process also had its surprises and ironies
since it did not occur, in a way which you, or anyone else, anticipated.
Socialist ideals had nothing to do with it. And the middle class did not
learn, as you hoped they might, to respect the ‘egalitarian warmth and sol-
idarity and decency’ of the working class. Nor did they forget their ‘aitches’
and pretensions, and become part of the working class. Change came from an
altogether different direction, and it did not inaugurate an era of equality.
If anything, inequalities increased as classes crumbled. We will wrap up our
investigation by trying to unravel this somewhat puzzling train of events.
11
The Class System Comes to an End
An explanation of the decline of the English class system is implicit in the

preceding explanation of its formation, for if it is true that classes have
been created by political events and decisions, and have depended on the
collaboration between the state and civil society, then it follows that polit-
ical decisions that significantly altered that collaboration and exposed the
corporate institutions that have maintained classes to market forces must
necessarily have threatened the class system. The reforms introduced by
the three Thatcher governments over 11 years between 1979–1991 did both
of these things. A review of them is therefore also an explanation of the
decline of the class system. It also provides a last chance to test the argu-
ment by comparing it with explanations of class as the product of material
inequalities, since as we noted at the very beginning these reforms were
accompanied by the abrupt reversal of the century-long trend towards
equality in the distribution of property and income. If material inequalities
had ever been prime determinants of classes, then we might expect class
consciousness to have increased during and after these reforms.
The themes and finality of Thatcher’s reforms
For clarity and brevity’s sake, we may distinguish the four major themes in
these reforms that are critical in the present context. In reality, they were
concurrent, implemented incrementally, interwoven with one another, as
well as interdependent in their effects. We will, therefore, be systematizing
policies that unfolded untidily, often fortuitously, and some only became
visible under the Major and Blair governments which followed. Summariz-
ing them in this manner will, however, enable us to see their cumulative
effect on the past collaboration between the state and on civil society, and
on the classes which they had together formed over the preceding three
centuries.
The first theme was privatization in all its varied forms, amongst which
we may include not only the best-known – the conversion of nationalized
310
The Class System Comes to an End 311
enterprises into publicly-traded joint-stock companies, but also the sale of

council houses to their tenants, the private tendering for public services
previously assumed to be an integral part of local government, as well as
the semi-privatization of the civil service by means of so-called executive
agencies, since these agencies were expected to perform tasks previously
performed by central government departments as if they were privately-
owned companies subject to the discipline of the market. Privatization
might also be said to have extended still further, and to include the cre-
ation of quasi-markets within the public services. General practitioners and
hospitals were required to compete for public funds against one another.
Universities were invited to made competitive bid for public funds to
supply specified educational programmes in the manner of defense con-
tractors. Schools were similarly required to compete in national league
tables. Institutions of further education providing vocational training were
to bid for ‘contracts’ to provide the kind of education their customers,
meaning local businessmen, required. All these quasi-markets fell short of
real markets of course, since there was, ultimately, only one buyer: the
central government. But the pretence of making these actors and institu-
tions behave as if they were no longer performing a public service and
merely private actors in the market, had real consequences, and may there-
fore be seen as another form of privatization.
These varied forms of privatization attacked the class system in a number of
ways. When public corporations went private, the peculiarly supportive envi-
ronment they had provided for unions and professional associations of all
kinds was immediately threatened, along with the collective property rights,
and the collective bargaining procedures that their employees had usually
established. The sale of their shares, along with the sale of council houses,
broke through distinctions which had hitherto helped to define classes, and
helped to create a nation in which everyone came to understand property
ownership in exactly the same conventional sense, rather than in the mystical
senses of property owned by the nation as a whole, or of that defined by the
collective jurisdictions of their profession or trade. One of Mrs Thatcher’s
significant electoral achievements was to recognize that many skilled workers
were already homeowners, already more attached to their private property
than to the collective defense of any property they might own as members of
their trades, and that she could therefore appeal to them as to other private
property owners. The sale of council houses increased the number of workers
who were open to this kind of appeal. Making professionals compete in quasi-
markets similarly undermined their sense of being collectively responsible for,
and having ownership rights in, a particular work jurisdiction. In the end,
therefore, all these forms of privatization encouraged everyone to think that
were equally isolated market actors.
The second major theme of her reforms was a series of enactments that
brought the ‘immunities’ of trade unions to an end, made their internal
governance and their actions in the furtherance of trade disputes subject to

the law.1 The cumulative effect of these reforms was to reduce considerably
the power of unions and to precipitate a sharp decline in their member-
ship, from just under a half of the labour force in 1979 to just under a third
in 2002.2 The three most significant reforms were: first, the abolition of the
closed shop which had obliged employees to belong to a union before or
after employment, and which many observers reckoned to be the founda-
tion of union power; second, the outlawing of mass pickets which had pre-
viously provided a dramatic and visible demonstration of union power and
solidarity; and third the prohibition of sympathy strikes and other kinds of
secondary action, such as the ‘blacking’ of the goods of an employer
involved in a dispute which had long been one of the most visible and
unambiguous expressions of class solidarity.3
One indication that these measures undermined collective obligations
and collective solidarity is the subsequent rapid increase in the number of
employees who pursued their grievances as individuals before industrial tri-
bunals.4 These tribunals were formed in 1964, and applications to them
reached a level of about 30,000 in the late 1970s and actually dropped
during the 1980s, the Thatcher years, most probably as a result of the
extended recession, but the number of applications then started a rapid
ascent to over 79,000 by 1998. In that year, they were renamed employ-
ment tribunals, and over the following three years, the rate of increase of
applications accelerated to about 130,000 in 2001/2002.5 Although unions
may represent applicants before them, these tribunals offered an alternative
to the traditional collective methods of handling grievances through shop
stewards and union officers. The X formed by the intersection of the con-
tinuous decline in union membership since Mrs Thatcher’s first year in
office, and the fluctuating, though nonetheless startling, overall climb in
the numbers resorting to these tribunals marks a fundamental transition in
employment relationships: away from means of redress that relied on col-
lective support and collective action, away from union or class solidarity,
and towards individual solutions. They also offered the possibility, never
contemplated by traditional collective procedures, of a substantial financial
windfall to the individual ‘victim’ of unfair dismissal or discriminatory or
other unfair action by an employer.
The third major theme of her reforms, implemented more or less contin-
uously over the entire 11 years of her three governments, was the attack on
the professions. Doctors, nurses, schoolteachers, academics, military
officers and civil servants and other professionals in the public service were
the first targets. Since they were public employees, they could be controlled
without further legislation and the public debate it entailed. Self-employed
private practitioners did not, however, escape. The two legal professions
were covered by the Courts and Legal Services Act of 1990, the last major
piece of legislation of the Thatcher era.6
These attacks on the professions usually began by pouring scorn on the

ideals and ethics that had previously governed their corporate institutions
and rules by suggesting that the special status they had enjoyed was unde-
served, and that their motives were no higher or more ethical than those of
businessmen and other employees. It then drew the inescapable conclusion
that they should henceforth be treated in the same manner.7 The special
relationship with the state they had long enjoyed under the unwritten con-
stitution was thereby repudiated, and the laissez gouverner assumption that
they could be trusted to set and enforce standards of performance, and to
regulate themselves was rejected.8 The reforms were based on the assump-
tion that the most trustworthy and reliable form of regulation was the
market, which was also the only reliable measure of the worth of any kind
of work. The latter was a deadly blow to the self-esteem of most professions
in England, since much the most plausible explanation of why they estab-
lished their corporate institutions in the first place is that they did not
accept that the market could ever provide an acceptable assessment of their
worth. They were now obliged to accept it.
Self-regulation was not even second best. Wherever market regulation
was not feasible, the reforms proposed that professionals should be regu-
lated by the state rather than by their own corporate institutions. Self-
employed professionals were therefore forced to abandon many of their
ethical rules, and obliged to think of themselves as entrepreneurs or trades-
men, subject like the others to state regulation. The funny quasi-markets
invented to persuade salaried public sector professionals that they were in a
marketplace have been mentioned, but where they could not be installed,
or where they proved unworkable, professionals were subject to central
state control, and to managerial controls that were common, or thought to
be common, in manufacturing industry. Incentive and bonus payments,
performance-related pay were therefore used to increase their productivity,
just as it had, supposedly, increased the productivity of other workers.
Professions, in short, were dishonoured, and no longer to be trusted to
define or defend the public interest which was, henceforth, to be defined
exclusively by the government, with the advice of management consul-
tants rather than professional bodies.9
One may observe the consequences in any professional setting one cares
to examine. Harrison and Ahmad documented the decline in clinical
autonomy of physicians as a result of the creation of quasi-markets in 1991,
and the imposition of clinical guidelines and clinical audits. They observed
the displacement of purely professional goals, so that ‘it has increasingly
become the case that doctors must adopt a managerial perspective if they
are to progress within the profession.’ They described contemporary British
medical care as ‘scientific-bureaucratic’: ‘scientific’ because it still relies
on an externally-generated body of research knowledge, but ‘bureaucratic’
because ‘it is implemented through bureaucratic rules … namely clinical
guidelines.’ These changes, they pointed out, have nothing whatever to do

with much-touted post-Fordist forms of management which are intended
to allow far greater local discretion and autonomy, but on the contrary
‘introduce to medicine the central Fordist notion of ‘one best way’.10
The fourth theme was the replacement or reform of practice-based, prac-
titioner-controlled vocational training. One commentator, looking back at
vocational education before these reforms, described it as a ‘jungle’ in
which there were ‘about 500 awarding bodies and about 6,000 different
qualifications.’11 It was a jungle, however, almost entirely of civil society’s
own making over many, many generations, though in 1964 the state had
begun to intervene to prevent ‘free riding’ employers escaping their obliga-
tions to train apprentices for their trade and industry. The Labour Govern-
ment of the day sought to encourage, fund and co-ordinate civil society’s
efforts by establishing statutory tripartite Industrial Training Boards. These
were empowered to organize training in their industry, and could impose a
compulsory training levy on all firms within it.12
The Thatcher governments abolished most of these boards, and launched
a succession of initiatives to devise a substitute for apprenticeship, the
Training Opportunities Scheme (TOPS), the Youth Opportunities Scheme
(YOPS), the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), the Technical and Vocational
Education Initiative (TVEI), and Technical Enterprise Centres (TECs).13 In
1986, the government suddenly decided that it should henceforth regulate
and control all vocational training by means of a newly-created National
Council of Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ). This council was empowered
to categorize and approve the required vocational skills of the entire labour
force, including the professions.
The one thing all these initiatives had in common was that they were all
state-controlled and state-managed. They excluded trade unions altogether
from any part in the design, administration or accreditation of the training
of manual workers, and made professional bodies measure, record and for-
malize the training given to their new entrants. They were predicated,
in other words, on the new relationship between state and civil society.14
The NCVQ itself was a particularly startling innovation, since the British
state had never previously, of its own initiative, provided or authenticated
a single educational or training credential, but overnight, this new state
agency was empowered to review, inspect, criticize, categorize and authen-
ticate all of the 500-odd voluntary, private and professional arrange-
ments that provided vocational credentials. Civil society’s jungle was to
be cleared.15
As it set about the task, practice-based practitioner-controlled training
was inevitably found to be inadequate, which was not surprising since it
had often rested on a personal relationship between practitioner and begin-
ner, was largely undocumented, undefined, and as rigorous or casual as the
practitioner cared to make it. It was therefore replaced by scheduled hours
of formal school-based and practical training that could be provided by a

variety of teachers and employers and completed when the student accu-
mulated a required number of certified credits. The intention, of course,
was to improve the quality, meaning the technical content, of the training
provided, and to obtain training ‘outputs’ that could be counted, but the
effect was to weaken, if not eliminate, the informal socialization that rules
and notions of occupational honour which had accompanied vocational
training in the past. Where the original apprenticeship had provided an
extended simultaneous socialization into craft, trade union and class, the
‘new apprenticeship’ did not require any personal relationship between
generations at all, since the apprentice selected his or her own ‘package’ of
skills, and accumulated vouchers and credits at various workplaces and
schools without incurring any obligation to any existing practitioners. It
certainly did not lead inevitably to membership of a union or of a class.
Reviewing progress up to 2002, one commentator noted that the attempt
to resuscitate this old institution in a new form suffered from ‘weak
employer engagement and commitment’, and the ‘lack of a regulatory role
for trade unions in the governance of apprenticeships.’16 As a result, it
lacked shopfloor credibility and legitimacy.
These four major reforms cannot plausibly be attributed to any under-
lying, global economic process. They were, it is true, provoked and justified
by four decades and more of economic failure, and by Britain’s widely-
recognized inability to create manufacturing enterprises that performed as
effectively as those elsewhere. They were sometimes defended as being
necessary in an increasingly global economy, but this is to say that they
were provoked by a political interpretation of the reasons for Britain’s
economic failure, and a political interpretation of the needs of a global
economy, not that they were the result of blind economic global forces.
A fuller account of them would, no doubt, point out how the way was
prepared for three of them – privatization being the exception – by earlier
governments. Among the more important preliminaries to reform of the
professions, for instance, were the investigations and reports of various
public agencies, such as the National Board for Prices and Incomes in the
late 1960s, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission in the 1970s, and
later the Office of Fair Trading.17 They were joined by private pressure
groups, most notably, the Consumer’s Association.18 Together they had
begun to define the public interest in the provision of professional services,
and had invariably found it to be sharply at odds with that provided by the
professions themselves. Since their criticisms of the deficiencies of the pro-
fessions were often supported by research (which the professions had
seldom conducted), and since these agencies had no identifiable vested
interest, their versions of the public interest had considerably more author-
ity and credibility than those offered by representatives of the professions.
They therefore helped to discredit the idea that professions might be
trusted to speak for the public interest, and began to redefine them as espe-
cially selfish and powerful vested interests. Failures of their disciplinary pro-
cedures, of which there were a considerable number, further discredited the
professions’ claims about the virtues and merits of self-regulation. Trade
unions were, meanwhile, making themselves immensely unpopular by wild-
cat strikes, culminating in the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–1979, which
contributed greatly to Mrs Thatcher’s first electoral success. The way was there-
fore prepared for the Thatcher governments to reform them both.
A fuller account would also, no doubt, point to certain economic trends,
for which her governments can hardly be held responsible, and which pre-
ceded and assisted the passage of her reforms. Manufacturing industries
had been the heartland of the institutional complex – apprenticeship, high
union membership and multi-union workplaces – that had been central
to the formation of the working class. Although the service sector had
created its own version of these institutions, apprenticeship and unions
had never had time to become as well-entrenched in them. But the decline
of manufacturing firms in the Midlands and North had begun long before
Mrs Thatcher was elected. The OECD reported that the United Kingdom
‘had the largest drop (in manufacturing employment) of any country, losing
nearly three million jobs at a steady rate from 1970 to 1986, whereupon
the level stabilized.’19 The distinctive ‘British system of mass production …
within which, to a large extent, labour regulated itself’ had already shown
its inability to compete with other systems elsewhere. Mrs Thatcher’s
reforms might therefore be said to have been working with, rather than
against the grain, and a potential source of organized opposition had been
weakened before she was even elected.
Another contributory factor was the surge in direct inward investment by
foreign companies. During many of the Thatcher years Britain had the
highest rate of direct inward investment per capita of any industrial eco-
nomy, and about 20% of British manufacturing came to be foreign-owned.20
The foreign threat to the class system was never, of course, overt and
explicit. No foreign firm ever openly announced that it wished to disman-
tle it, but they often adopted employment policies and career structures
at odds with those of customary British practice, and did not share the
assumptions on which that system’s survival rested. How could Japanese or
American managers support English-style apprenticeships? Or even under-
stand the notion of a ‘free rider’ in this respect? Their own domestic
systems of vocational training had long since left every employer to train
employees as much or as little as they wished, so they were all ‘free riders’.
And why should they accept the legitimacy of collective self-regulation on
the factory floor? One might as well have expected them to start playing
cricket.
The oil refinery studied by Flanders, discussed earlier, was American-
owned, and it suggests that blissful ignorance was more common than the
conscious rejection of normal English practice. The negotiations that were

the subject of his study were prompted by the American parent company
noticing, after many years, that its English subsidiary had much lower pro-
ductivity than one of its closely comparable American-based refineries.
Although there were no American managers permanently at the site, the
English subsidiary, had deliberately departed from common English prac-
tice in a few respects. It had opted out of the employers’ association for the
industry, for instance, and therefore out of industry-wide agreements,
which is why the productivity negotiations were possible in the first place.
There was also some casual assimilation of American practices. Flanders
thought that the policy of involving line management in personnel affairs
had ‘gone much further … than is usual in British industry’, and that the
absence of ‘formal trappings of a strict hierarchical authority and well-
observed status distinctions’ among management, and the ‘free use of
Christian names, and lack of deference to superiors may well have American
origins or reinforcements’. When, however, American approaches were
thought to clash sharply with normal British procedures they were rejected
or ignored. One American consultant, for instance, horrified English man-
agers with his suggestion of an ‘opener’ to the negotiations. ‘Why not
cut back wages to show we mean business?’ He was supported by ano-
ther American who asked, ‘Why not just stop having craftsmen’s’ rates?’
They were silenced by their English colleagues, and thereafter appeared
throughout the negotiations, like the chorus of a Greek play, to voice their
incomprehension and wonder at the reactions of the English skilled
workers.
In this instance, therefore, most ‘foreign’ practices seem to have been
rejected, but research elsewhere shows that (some) foreign-owned multi-
nationals were able to impose different work practices in their English
plants. One manager who had moved from British-owned and managed car
manufacturing firms to work for Ford in the early 1960s observed that ‘The
world of Ford … is so utterly and completely different; we are not talking
about Ford vs BMC or Ford vs Standard Triumph, we are really dealing with
the difference between earth and the planet Mars.’21 When Japanese car
firms began to establish themselves on greenfield sites they also were
from another planet, and introduced fundamentally different employment
and working relationships, such as company-specific training, competitive
teams which ignored trade distinctions, and representation by a single
union.22
Foreigners probably made the greatest impact, however, on the insti-
tutions not of the working class but at the other end of the class system –
in the City of London on the supposed successors to the aristocratic ruling
class. They had begun to do so some time before Mrs Thatcher became
prime minister.23 At the end of 1960s there were just 77 foreign banks in
the City, and by 1976 there were 298. However, they began to undermine
the City’s way of life and institutions only after one of Mrs Thatcher’s first
reforms, the removal of exchange controls in 1981, and after repeated
threats by the Office of Fair Trading prompted the City to reform its own
working practices in the so-called ‘Big Bang’ of October 1986. American
banks took the lead in rejecting the City’s traditional working practices.
They devised the new products, adopted aggressive marketing techniques,
and introduced new employment policies within the square mile, such as
‘poaching’ of staff, ‘touting’ for new business, 70-hour working weeks, and
gigantic annual bonuses. Other foreign banks felt obliged to adopt these
American practices along with the British, and the City was therefore rapidly
transformed from being one of the most traditional English working environ-
ments into the epitome of the modern and the ‘global’. By the end of the
1990s, it was, Kynaston observed, ‘no longer British either in ownership or
character and had been converted into something akin to Wall Street.’24 In
this new internationalized environment, school, regimental and class back-
ground were meaningless, and were, if anything, merely targets of banter
and ridicule.
However, it seems unlikely that a fuller account, which gave due atten-
tion to all these earlier contributory factors and events, to the reforms of
the Wilson, Heath and Callaghan governments, to the impact of foreigners,
and to global economic changes would end up without giving priority to
the political events and political decisions of the Thatcher era. The central-
ization of the Crown Prosecution Service, the abolition of ITBs, the creation
of the NCVQ, the creation of numerous regulatory bodies OFSTED, OFWAT
and so forth were political choices, not responses to economic circum-
stances. The reforms of trade unions did not spread by some inexorable
economic necessity or technological logic from the private sector to the
government and the public sector. Just the reverse. Throughout the years of
industrial relations reform, business sought to restrain the government and
urged it to halt further legislation, and continued to do so long after
Mrs Thatcher had resigned.25 No surveys located strong anti-union senti-
ment among disgruntled employers and managers to which the Thatcher
governments felt obliged to respond.26 Most employers did not rush to take
advantage of the legislation to de-recognize unions, or assert managerial
prerogatives, and continued, for some years at least, to prefer their custom-
ary practices.27 The most common employer response, according to the
authoritative series of WIRS surveys, was not to de-recognize unions and
end collective bargaining, but to raise the proportion of companies report-
ing ‘an initiative to increase employee involvement’ by means of commit-
tees, representation, briefings, quality circles and incentive or ownership
schemes.28
As an employer, the government did not, therefore, follow the private
sector, but behaved as it imagined private employers ought to behave, or
were behaving. Having long been the most sympathetic towards unions,
the public sector rapidly transformed itself into the least sympathetic, and
on a number of occasions, it simply ignored trade unions, and imposed its
preferred terms and conditions on its unhappy employees without any
negotiations. Most of the new more ‘flexible’, short-term, part-time forms
of employment introduced in the 1980s were to be found in the public
sector, not the private sector who were supposed to have inspired them.29
Politics must therefore be given priority in any explanation of these
reforms. The successive blows against the institutions that had maintained
class distinctions and sentiments were politically inspired and justified –
the product of political will and of fortunate political circumstances. If
global economic trends had been important, it would be rather easier to
find similar reforms elsewhere, but with the exception of the privatization
of public enterprises, which anyway followed rather than preceded the
British, it is not easy to do so. Jenkins reasonably observed that the British
were moving in exactly the opposite direction of most European countries,
centralizing when they were struggling to decentralize.30 Politics was, we
may conclude, as decisive at the end of the class system, as it had been at
the beginning.
Classes did not, and could not, of course, disappear overnight. The dis-
mantling was piecemeal and progressive, not of a dramatic, violent, extra-
legal kind that might have erased memories or broken the habits and
language of a lifetime. Trade unions and professional bodies have not dis-
appeared, though they have unobtrusively become service organizations or
consultancies for their members, and no longer collegial communities
capable of upholding distinctive class codes of honour.31 All the many other
extra-workplace institutions shaped over generations by class were not sud-
denly reconstructed. Class continued to be used as a synonym for inequal-
ities of income, power and status; and market researchers social scientists,
pollsters, census bureaux continued to find it useful to divide the popu-
lation into categories of some kind which they called classes. Attempts
to discover new classes also continued, in the hope of finding one that
can capture media attention and the public imagination in the way ‘Sloan
Rangers’ once did.32 One group of sociologists decided to reinterpret class as
an ‘individuated process’, not particularly important in people’s lives,
entailing no collective membership, loyalties and institutions, but merely a
benchmark of social evaluation.33 In this sense, class will surely live for
ever.
If, however, classes are seen as larger cultural collectivities which have
shaped and distinguished lives of those who belong to them, whose bound-
aries are widely recognized and provide invidious reference points of con-
duct with corporate institutions that socialize young men and women into
distinctive notions of class honour and manners, and associations that dis-
seminate and defend their class interests, they have been in irreversible
decline for two decades and more. All kinds of apprenticeship and informal
practice-based, practitioner-controlled training that socialized newcomers

into the distinctive codes of ethics and honour of their class have declined,
and no new corporate institutions have appeared to perform their vital
class-making, class mobilizing, and class-reproducing functions. Privat-
ization has eliminated the most supportive environment for trade union
membership. Trade union reform has lessened the chances of any kind of
collective action, and altogether removed the opportunities for workers to
demonstrate their class solidarity by secondary action. Reform of the pro-
fessions has loosened all manner of collegial ethical restraints and obliged
self-employed professionals to consider themselves simply as market actors
and entrepreneurs, and publicly-employed ones to behave as if they too
were in a market. The codes of honour of the middle and working classes
are becoming as quaint and nostalgic as those of the aristocracy, perhaps
already are. In 1985, one miner who knew that his own pit had been
ruined by the strike he supported, observed, ‘There’s nothing for us here …
but the strike is about other pits and other jobs.’ The union’s branch pre-
sident added, ‘I try to instil in them that it is not their union to break …
We only borrow the union. It belongs to our fathers and sons.’34
One may be reasonably sure that the decline is irreversible because
neither of Mrs Thatcher’s two successors showed the least inclination to re-
establish the traditional relationship between the state and civil society, or
to restore powers to either professions or trade unions.35 They have had no
electoral incentives to do so. Mrs Thatcher’s three successive election vic-
tories had shown that these reforms had few, if any, electoral costs. Pro-
fessions and trade unions had no electorally decisive popular support. The
balance of power between state and civil society had never become an elec-
toral issue, except perhaps as a by-product of ethnic politics of Scotland
and Wales because an English-dominated and London-based state was with-
drawing powers from their civil societies. It seems highly improbable that
some future government will decide to renationalize industries, to restore
the immunities of professions and trade unions, or allow strikes to once
again assume a class dimension, or force universities and colleges of fur-
ther education to hand back to practitioners the vocational training respon-
sibilities they have assumed. Consultants’ participation in the business of
government shows no sign of declining. On the contrary, it increased mas-
sively under the Blair governments.36 Most important of all, both Mr Major
and Mr Blair were committed to creating a mass system of higher educa-
tion, and thereby expanding the opportunities for individual betterment
that long ago helped to frustrate the formation of an American class system. Is
it likely that it will be halted or reversed by Mr. Brown or any of his succes-
sors? Classes have therefore been left with few firm institutional moorings,
the House of Lords and public schools may continue to make a modest con-
tribution to them, as will the ‘estates’ or ‘tenant-managed organizations’ of
local councils, and one or two trade union leaders who intermittently
claim they are engaged in class struggle, plus a handful of sociologists.

These hardly seem sufficient to maintain the entire system.
One of Mrs Thatcher’s most decisive blows against class was to make no
reference to it. Cannadine noted that ‘she was determined to drive the lan-
guage of class off the political agenda of public discussion … The word class
hardly ever appeared in her speeches … Politics, she insisted, “was not a
matter of class, and class warfare was an outmoded Marxist doctrine which
had incited social conflict where it would not otherwise have existed.”’
After leaving office, she continued in the same vein. ‘The more you talk
about class – or even about classlessness, the more you fix the idea in
people’s minds.’ She preferred the language of the customer and consumer,
and the voter.’ John Major was backsliding, in her view, by even mention-
ing his ambition to create a classless society.37
Four successive electoral defeats also persuaded the Labour Party to
abandon its class appeal and rhetoric. The omission of the word class from
their vocabulary was so abrupt and uniform, that one must infer that it was
in response to a decision at the highest level of the party. A longitudinal
study of the party’s grassroots over the years 1990–1999 showed a large
shift away from the belief in the importance of ‘class struggle between
labour and capital, particularly among new members.’38 If political leaders
decline to use the term ‘class’ to refer to collective entities with a common
fate and condition, and if, as seems to be the case, neither their consti-
tuents, the media, academic researchers nor union leaders oblige them to
do so, then it is difficult to see how class can serve any longer as a
significant reference point in political and social life. Sartori’s argument
that political parties do not simply reflect or express pre-existing class dif-
ferences, but define, articulate, and therefore create them, has been
emphatically vindicated.39 Even he might have been surprised, however,
that they could also help to destroy classes simply by ceasing to refer to
them.
The demise of the British class system not only provided a final test of
the argument that has informed the entire investigation, but also provides
further corroboration of one of the conclusions we drew from our examina-
tion of classes in Russia, France and the United States, namely, that market
forces are a solvent of class institutions. Evidence from these three societies
suggested that classes were best formed when the state and civil society
acted in concert, and when either of them was unwilling to do so, classes
were not formed successfully, because the other became, by its inaction, a
silent ally of class-destroying market forces. So it has proved repeatedly in
the English case. Having collaborated for more than 300 years with civil
society, thereby enabling classes to be formed and to flourish, the state sud-
denly ended the collaboration during the Thatcher era, switched sides as it
were, and forced large sectors of civil society to accept and live by market
forces. It thereby sealed the fate of the class system, which now has to
depend on organized groups in civil society alone. Market forces meanwhile

continue their normal routine – the perpetual creation of new inequalities.
We can all be spectators of the phenomenon, since it is being played out,
with full media coverage, in many English sports. All of them were pre-
viously insulated from market forces in various ways by their amateur self-
governing bodies which permitted little inequality between players or teams,
and everybody knew their class coupling. Now, as they have been opened
to market forces, they are all becoming, or trying to become, classless and
national, while the inequalities between the outstanding and merely
average clubs and players reach monumental proportions.
The hidden injuries of classlessness
The demise of the class system has not been quite as exhilarating as many
had predicted and hoped. There was no climactic struggle between classes,
no stirring call to arms, no mass meetings, no proclamations. No incorrig-
ible diehards appeared to defend the doomed ancien régime. The system was
disassembled piece-by-piece rather than overthrown, and by the wrong
leader and the wrong party in the service of the wrong ideals. Having cru-
saded for so long on behalf of the working class, we all came to assume that
the destruction of the class system was the Left’s historic task, and that if it
ever happened, it would be their triumph. They already seemed to have
one hand on the trophy. We were therefore looking in the wrong direction.
Moreover, the leader of the governments that did most to destroy it never
explicitly proclaimed her intention. The class system was so much coll-
ateral damage, a victim of reforms primarily intended to increase the sway
of market forces, and never itself the primary target, so it hardly warranted
congratulations or celebrations.
Orwell seems to have been alone in wondering whether ‘a classless society
doesn’t mean a beatific state of affairs … perhaps it means a bleak world
in which all our ideals, our codes, our tastes – our ‘ideology in fact – will
have no meaning.’40 Everyone else seems to have agreed that class was an
unmitigated evil, and therefore only counted its costs. Only a brave soul
would have tried to assess its benefits. Bauer might, in fairness, have observed
that the British ‘obsession’ with class he complained about was accom-
panied by continuous redistribution of wealth and income, by widening
of access to universities, by the creation of the NHS, and by unequalled
opportunities for shopfloor workers to be promoted into management.
Which leads one to wonder, whether the ‘obsession’ might not merely
have accompanied these things, but to some degree at least have been
responsible for them.
Trow observed that ‘a culture is defined in part, by what it feels guilty
about’, and it is possible that, haunted by the belief that class was their
country’s great sin, the British may have made disproportionate, guilt-
ridden efforts to try and counteract it, such as universal health care, and
grants to enable poorer students to attend university.41 The obsession or
myth also carried an implicit warning, even a threat. It heightened and
legitimated political concern and political action to try and reduce class
inequalities. It may also have generated some sense of obligation. The more
philanthropic or socially-minded responses that the British usually gave to
opinion questionnaires about government welfare and redistributive pol-
icies may have been prompted by class sentiments, that is by a sense that
there are classes of people toward whom one cannot expect quite as much
as one would from oneself or one’s peers, and to whom one cannot apply
quite the same standards. Correspondingly, the more ‘selfish’ American
responses to such questions seem to arise from an instinctive and pervasive
egalitarianism, from a deep sense that everyone, providing they have had
an opportunity to obtain an education, is in fact equal. Such inequalities as
may subsequently arise between them must therefore be the result of their
merit and effort, and no class or classes of people therefore deserve special
treatment or sympathy from the state.
However that may be, it seems likely that once the myth has been dis-
pelled and the language of class has fallen into disuse, political support for
redistribution and equality will decline. This is hardly a rash prediction,
since it has long since been overtaken by events. Little, it now seems, can
be done or need by done, to mobilize sentiment against inequalities, how-
ever offensive and unjust they may appear. Classes were once thought as
the great enemy of equality, and classlessness was seen as synonymous
with equality. We now have to recognize that classes may all along have
been an ally of equality, and fighting for it without them may prove to be
an uphill task. The English must now, it seems, simply learn to behave like
other classless societies, and live with innumerable finely-graduated, con-
tinuously-invented ad hoc status distinctions, – residential, occupational,
recreational – rather than broad and profound class divisions that mark dif-
ferent ways of life with distinct notions of honour. They must also learn to
tolerate severe inequalities of wealth and income, like those found in the
United States, or perhaps inequalities of mobility opportunities like those
found in Japan, and maybe both.42
A question remains, the question raised by Orwell’s remark. How are the
English changing as the long-standing reference points and loyalties of
class disappear from their lives? No social science theory offers much help
in answering it, and other classless societies can give only rough indica-
tions, since none of them had created anything like Britain’s class system,
or experienced the kind of reforms that brought it to an end. Perhaps one
may turn first to Mrs Thatcher’s own predictions and expectations. These
were, not unnaturally, selective and incomplete, and never, for reasons
mentioned, referred directly to class, but she certainly had a vision of the
consequences of her reforms, and these are a starting point.
As her quotation of St. Francis’s words, ‘where there is discord may we

bring harmony’, on accepting office indicated, she clearly intended to
reduce industrial warfare, and over the longer run at least, seems to have
succeeded in this respect. After the climactic industrial disputes that marked
her early years of office, the number of days lost through strikes fell sharply
and has remained very low.43 She may also have been successful in creat-
ing a more ‘entrepreneurial culture’ – another declared goal, though the
evidence is not beyond dispute since studies of the rate of entrepreneurship
are not longitudinal, and do not allow a before/after comparison. During
her years in office, self-employment nearly doubled as a percentage of the
labour force from 7% to 13%, though a large proportion of these newly
self-employed were only concerned with employing themselves, rather than
behaving like real entrepreneurs and creating enterprises that would employ
others.44 Recent evidence suggests, however, that the climate for entre-
preneurship is significantly more congenial in contemporary Britain than
in France or Germany, and that the British are more likely to embark
on entrepreneurial endeavours than inhabitants of those two countries.45
Moreover, the relaxation of professional ethics, and the extension of market
forces within most professional jurisdictions must, it seems safe to say,
have provided scope for new kinds of legal, medical and academic entrepre-
neurship. Advertising for personal injury claimants bombards television
viewers nightly, and the ‘compensation culture’ is, after all, one form of
entrepreneurial endeavour.
The Thatcher reforms, however, had other consequences which she did
not dwell on, and they are no less important, and perhaps more important,
in shaping classless Britain. In trying to pin them down, we face a problem
familiar to every analyst of the Soviet Union, of distinguishing the conse-
quences of the goal from the means adopted to achieve it, that is, of dis-
tinguishing the consequences of socialism from the consequences of the
particular way the Bolsheviks sought to create it, or the conditions under
which they had to create it. Here, we would like to distinguish between the
consequences of classlessness, and the consequences of the particular means
by which the Thatcher governments dismantled the structures that had
held it in place. Sovietologists never solved their problem, and I do not
think we can solve its British counterpart.
In the end, it may not matter. Socialism in Russia was what the Bolsheviks
created, and classlessness in Britain is what the Thatcher, Major and Blair
governments have cumulatively created. I will answer the question by iden-
tifying three closely interrelated and defining features of classless Britain,
taking advantage of such clues as comparison with our other societies has
to offer.
To begin with the least contentious: Britain has become a much more
centralized society. Mrs Thatcher liked to boast that she was ‘getting the
state off our backs’. The sale of shares in the public corporations provides
the best, and perhaps only, support for this claim, though one must observe
that the original architects of these corporations intended them to be free-
standing independent entities, like the BBC, not a part of the apparatus of
the central government. It was only their financial problems that made them
dependent on central government, and her privatization measures were
intended as much to rid the Exchequer of the perennial problems public
corporations presented as to liberate the average taxpayer and citizen from
central state control. In every other respect, her reforms entailed an increase
in the powers of central government, at the expense not only of local gov-
ernment, but also of self-governing professions and trade unions.
Accounts of the growth of democracy in Britain focus on the national
government. Local government may be mentioned in footnotes and post-
scripts, but the miniature forms of representative government created by
professions and trade unions are never mentioned at all. Why should they
be? They were after all a part of civil society rather than of government.
However, since they exercised powers that were elsewhere the functions of
government, or required statutory support and confirmation, we might, for
a moment, take a broader view, and include them as part of the polity. If
we do so, we may notice that one of the peculiarities of British political
development is that representative governments in the workplace were
established before a democratic political system at a national or local
level. Indeed, it may be that Britain was able to establish a national mass
democracy in its famously cautious, evolutionary manner precisely because
organized groups in civil society had already created mini-representative
governments which could protect the immediate interests of large pro-
portions of the potential electorate rather more effectively than the House
of Commons was ever likely to do. All governments, prior to Mrs Thatcher’s,
respected the sovereignty of these ‘little commonwealths’ and ‘little republics’.46
Her governments by contrast took the view that Charles II had been right
after all, when he, or his counsel argued against the City of London in 1685
that ‘little commonwealths’ and ‘little republics all over the Kingdom’ are
not ‘conducive to good government’. They therefore behaved as if seeking
to retrieve powers carelessly ceded by their predecessors over many genera-
tions. In rapid succession, she and her ministers served their own writs of
quo warranto against the professions, usually prefaced by critical reports
such as that on the civil service by a director of Marks and Spencer’s, about
the NHS by a director of Sainsbury’s, about the universities by a director of
Reed Paper.47
Primary and secondary schools provide a startling first example of cen-
tralization. Schoolteachers, once responsible only to themselves, or their
heads, or more distantly to their local education authorities were ordered to
teach a nationally-prescribed curriculum and were held accountable to
central government, via flying visits of state inspectors, and continuous
series of tests which provided national league tables of the performance of
their pupils. The Secretary of State also assumed the right to interfere in the
performance of any school that he and his officials deemed unsatisfactory,
by turning the national media spotlight on what they believed were the
worst, by despatching so-called ‘hit squads’ to deal with them, and by
installing so-called ‘super-heads’ to replace the existing head teachers.
Universities surrendered their autonomy with little protest. The academ-
ically-controlled University Grants Committee previously responsible for
distributing public funds was replaced by a state agency, the Higher Edu-
cation Funding Council responsible to the Secretary of State for Education.
University charters were summarily rewritten by a team of judges, so-called
commissioners, drafted for the purpose. Hence a step that had provoked
the opposition to James II, and had had critical consequences for the develop-
ment of American education when Dartmouth College resisted the attempts
of the State of New Hampshire to rewrite its charter, passed with barely a
squeak of dissent. Communications to the universities from the UFC, and
later the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFC) then came, as Trow
observed, ‘in the form of announcements of public policy, followed up by
letters to the institutions specifying what they were to do to comply with
them.’48 Universities were also subjected to state audits of both their teach-
ing and research standards, and like schools, given grades that were pub-
lished in league tables.
If we leave aside public schools, it seems doubtful whether any edu-
cational system in the developed world is now as centralized as the English.
English observers used to relish telling a story, which they expected would
provoke horror and amazement, about the French Minister of Education
who could look at his watch and tell what every child in France was being
taught at that particular moment. Apart from the public schools, the English
have now concentrated power still more decisively, since the funding and
control of elite institutions in France was never the responsibility of the
Minister of Education. More ironically still, the sort of control now exer-
cised by the HEFC over individual university departments, rather than univer-
sities as corporate entities, reproduces the lines of command that Napoleon’s
Imperial University established over each faculty. It is now foreign observers
who tell stories that provoke horror and amazement about English education.
One measure of the significance of any reform is to contemplate how
past generations might have responded to it. In the case of education, they
would surely wonder if they were in the same country. The Royal Com-
mission on the Universities of 1850–1852 was preceded by many years of
discussion to overcome the objections of those at both universities who
thought that examination by ‘any power extraneous to the university’
would be ‘illegal’ and ‘in violation of their just and ancient rights’. The
then prime minister, Lord John Russell, made repeated assurances of ‘the
voluntary nature of the Commission.’, but even so many dons declined to
co-operate with it. After it reported, the new prime minister, Palmerston,
wrote to the chancellors of the two universities asking them ‘what aid they
may desire from parliament in the form either of prohibitions, of enabling
powers, or of new Enactments.’49 We know from the debates and protests
surrrounding the reform of primary schools in the early twentieth century,
that the idea that the people of Cornwall, or Leicestershire or Yorkshire
were somehow incapable of themselves deciding how to run their schools,
and that a minister in London, along with his officials and ‘hit squads’
should decide for them, would have been a shocking one. There is even
a marked contrast with government policies only a few decades ago.
When in 1964, the first Wilson government sought to be rid of selective
secondary schools, it declined to impose any solution on local authorities,
and grammar schools and the 11-plus selection examination therefore
continued in a number of counties. The Thatcher governments, by con-
trast, had no inhibitions about imposing anything and everything on local
authorities, schools and universities.
Sometimes, it is true, as if embarrassed by the vast range of new powers
it was accumulating, these governments permitted a degree of nominal
and conditional decentralization by means of independent-sounding insti-
tutions such as trusts, boards and councils. Schools were, for instance, pro-
vided a means of escaping from local government control, either by so-called
‘local management’, or by means of ‘grant-maintained’ schools, which
Mrs Thatcher herself wanted to call ‘independent state schools’ and by
‘trust’ schools. However, these independent-sounding bodies got local gov-
ernment off their backs only to come firmly under the control of the cen-
tral government’s Department of Education. Hospitals were likewise allowed
to opt for independence as ‘trusts’ which also sounded independent, but in
1993 the former director of personnel at the NHS observed, ‘the view one
hears on all sides from trusts is that central control is tighter than for the
past 20 years.’50 These were all bogus forms of decentralization, because
none of these institutions were allowed to be financially independent of
central government, and the voluntary-sounding bodies were often headed
by spoilsmen, all of whom owed their appointment to ministerial patronage.51
These are Potemkin institutions, and provide about as much evidence of a
vibrant civil society as the cardboard villages Count Potemkin constructed
to impress Catherine the Great with the prosperity and vitality of the Crimea.
The Blair governments imitated the Thatcher governments in this respect,
as in so many others, so it is no wonder that there was some scepticism
about its so-called ‘foundation’ hospitals in the NHS, which were sup-
posedly to be free of control from the Department of Health.52
The second defining characteristic of classless Britain is that it has become
more hierarchical. This followed, of course, from centralization which nec-
essarily required instruments of management and control, though at first
glance, it may seem a somewhat odd, and even paradoxical outcome. The
class system was supposed to be the embodiment of a hierarchical society,
and classlessness synonymous with equality. However, the barriers and

social distance between middle and working class occupations, always co-
existed with collegial and egalitarian intra-occupational and intra-class rela-
tionships, since both professional associations and trade unions diffused
and distributed power at the workplace, as the evidence from English work-
places presented above copiously demonstrated. Most of the Thatcher
reforms, by contrast, were specifically dedicated to destroying this kind of
collegiality and diffusion of power, and making British workplaces rather
more hierarchical and managed. She might have better described her
reforms not as ‘getting the state off our backs’ but as ‘getting our colleagues
of our backs’, and installing supervisors, managers, and state regulators of
various kinds in their place.
In the private sector, trade union reforms worked to this end in two
ways, first, by reducing the chances of spontaneous collective action to
resist managerial control over their members at the workplace. English
workers were finally obliged to submit to the forms of discipline and con-
trol to which American, French and Japanese workers had long become
accustomed – methods which, as the skilled worker-sociologist Rayton put
it, ‘take your freedom away, take your conscience from you’. Their second
effect was that, even while the powers of trade unions relative to employers
were decreased, the powers of full-time union officials over their lay
shopfloor representatives and members were increased. Unofficial ‘light-
ning’ strikes, were very common in the 1960s and 1970s, and union offi-
cials had felt obliged to make them official retroactively, ‘on the nod’. Such
strikes had been widely condemned for many years for the damage caused
to British industry, but whatever that may have been, there can be little
doubt that they were an emphatic expression of union democracy. The
Thatcher governments’ industrial relations reforms made it financially ruinous
for a union, or its members to ignore the procedures required by law, and
thereby substantially reinforced the power of both union officials over their
lay members. ‘Lightning’, direct democracy thereby came to an end, and
union members and officials had to follow the more conventional legally-
defined rules of representative democracy.
Grunberg’s account of his return, after the first five years of ‘Thatcherism’,
to a car manufacturing plant at Ryton which he had first studied just before
Mrs Thatcher’s election brings out the effects particularly sharply, though
they may have been exaggerated in this case because it was an American-
owned company and his visits coincided with a period of high unemploy-
ment, and a change of management direction within the company, which
had previously accepted British working practices.53 Nonetheless, it illus-
trates rather clearly the potential of the new laws. Management had, he
observed, launched ‘a sustained attack on workers’ shopfloor power’, had
refused to compromise during a three-month strike, and refused thereafter
to tolerate lightning stoppages as it had in the past. It no longer granted
shop stewards time for union business and assigned them to normal jobs,
‘thus reducing their ability to circulate freely in the plants and to con-
centrate on workers’ grievances.’ It had also instituted ‘direct lines of com-
munication to workers with briefings by foremen during work time (while
meetings called by stewards were timed and deducted from the men’s
pay) … ‘. Management had also begun ‘to ignore stewards, refusing to meet
with them directly, and forcing them to negotiate with foremen and direct
line supervisors.’ Manning arrangements, which in the past were nego-
tiated with stewards, were transmitted to supervisors, and thence to the
men, and ‘only given to the stewards out of courtesy.’54
Successive Workplace Relations (WIRS) surveys suggest that this was a
somewhat exceptional case, in private industry at least, though at least one
other volume car manufacturing firm made a similar assault on shopfloor
self-regulation.55 However, it is in the public sector, where the government
also wielded the powers of an employer, that the construction of man-
agerial hierarchies is most clearly visible. Responsibilities formerly diffused
among professionals and semi-professionals were assigned to designated
managers who were given appropriate status, authority and rewards to
supervise their former colleagues. Civil servants were encouraged to forget
their policy-advising function, to abandon the notion that they were inde-
pendent guardians of the public interest, and instead became managerial
subordinates of their ministers who they were expected to serve rather than
advise, and to establish command structures to ensure their subordinates
worked as efficiently as the private sector.56 Chairs of university depart-
ments were taken aside and told to ‘manage’ their junior colleagues. Head-
masters previously primus inter pares were similarly converted into managers,
and former colleagues became their subordinates.
One of the more striking examples of the construction of hierarchies
were to be found in the health services. Hospital consultants previously
‘lords unto themselves’ were required in 1990 to negotiate a ‘job plan with
their general managers’, which would be the basis of their future contracts.
These set out their main duties and responsibilities, and proposed ‘a work
programme for a typical week’. The tone of the recommended form of con-
tract was peremptory and imperative: ‘You will be expected to work with
local managers … You are expected to observe the units’ agreed policies
and procedures ….You will devote time to this activity on a regular basis’
etc. etc. Moreover, the day to-day management of these contracts was
transferred from the regional health authorities, where they had been lodged
since the founding of the NHS to prevent any local interference with con-
sultants’ clinical autonomy, to their direct managerial supervisors in the
district health authorities.57
An analogous line management logic was applied to nurses, who consti-
tuted about half of the entire NHS workforce, and were an extraordinarily
diverse collection of near-professions and semi-professions, differentiated
and stratified by their training, their qualifications, their specialties and

places of work. Although they had always been formally subject to the
overall supervision of consultants and hospital administrators, this was
seldom exercised directly, and both consultants and administrators deferred
to the authority of the matron who was herself, invariably, a former nurse.
Nurses also had many professional characteristics. They were primarily
trained on the job, had a strong sense of their own jurisdiction and respon-
sibilities, and high rates of membership in one or other professional associ-
ation or trade union. Over many years, their professional status had been
gradually and somewhat grudgingly acknowledged. ‘Consensus manage-
ment’, which had been witheringly dismissed in the Griffiths Report, was
in fact something of a triumph for them, the successful culmination of a
long struggle for professional status. Shortly after the publication of this
report in October 1988, their struggle was brought to an end. Every kind of
nurse, from aides and auxiliaries, enrolled and registered nurses, hospital
and district nurses, ward sisters, midwives and teaching staff, each of which
had previously developed their own grades and career paths, were assigned
to one of nine letter grades of a uniform national scale. Ward sisters, for
instance, who had previously been jointly responsible for the running of a
ward had to compete for the single grade G permitted for each ward, since
only one of them could be a ‘ward manager’, and satisfy the requirements
of being in charge with ‘continuing responsibility.’58
The construction of all these new hierarchies was accompanied and legit-
imized by a militant assertion of managerial ideology, resting on the claim
that there is a special kind of expertise in organizing and controlling other
people’s work, that its principles are known and may be acquired in man-
agement schools, and that this expertise entitles those who possess it to
decide how any type of work may be best performed, irrespective of the
manager’s own prior expertise and experience. This ideology was first
enunciated by Frederick Winslow Taylor at Midvale Steel, Pennsylvania, at
the end of the nineteenth century. He made extravagant claims on its
behalf, and the enthusiastic reception given his ideas by employers and
managers in the United States turned him into the first management guru.
His ideas were also warmly received in France and Japan, as well as by the
new rulers of Soviet Russia.59 In Britain, they were decisively and repeatedly
rejected.60 British manufacturing industry had long preferred a functional
type of authority, similar to that found in both professions and crafts, in
which the authority of superiors is specific and delimited, and rests on
greater experience and expertise in the specific tasks they were expected
to supervise.61 It is this view of managerial authority that explains the self-
regulation on the shop floor documented earlier, and explains why, as
we noted earlier, British industry consistently had a high ratio of skilled
to unskilled workers when compared both with the United States and
France.
It seems unlikely that this new assertive style of management emerged

spontaneously from British manufacturing industry, since it continued,
and even accelerated, its long, uninterrupted decline during and after the
Thatcher years. It can hardly therefore have been much of a force for
change. One British service industry may have made a distinctive contri-
bution; mass retailing, since directors of two of the then leading retailers
had written the reports preceding public sector reform, and retail trade was
probably the industry with which Mrs Thatcher was most familiar, as are
the rest of us. However, the most important source of inspiration seems to
have been management consultants, and ultimately therefore, manufac-
turing and service industries in the United States since, whatever their
nationality, consultants have relied almost exclusively on evidence from
this source.
Mrs Thatcher and the ministers in the cabinets did not share the tra-
ditional British antipathy to the methods of scientific management. Although
it was nearly 100 years since they were first formulated, they greeted them
like some-newly-discovered panacea. Presumably, they were persuaded, via
the No. 10 Policy Unit, and by their favoured consultants, Coopers & Lybrand,
though they were never mentioned in her memoirs. In any event, with all
the enthusiasm of late converts, they imposed the methods of scientific
management comprehensively across the public sector. National census
data on the sudden rise in the number of managers in Britain provides a
rough measure of the transition. In the earliest decades in which the
number of managers have been recorded, Britain always languished at the
bottom of international league tables, but over the decade of the 1980s, it
zoomed to very near the top.62 And since the government now controlled
higher education, management suddenly became an academic craze. There
was no opportunity for universities to debate or define its academic merits,
or to perform the ‘counter-cyclical’ role that David Riesman had urged.63
The number of universities teaching this new expertise exploded, as they
stampeded to get their share of the public funds that it brought their way.64
Government therefore created the demand for managers, and with the
compliance of universities that it now controlled, arranged the supply,
redirecting over a very short time the minds, careers and ambitions of a
generation, bringing to mind Rousseau’s observation that in the end we are
all what governments make of us.
The newly-constructed managerial hierarchies of control imposed across
the public sector all of course led back to the relevant ministries in
Whitehall, which then had the task of making sense of the massive inward
flows of information they generated, and managing this vast ensemble, or
acting as if they were managing it. Since neither civil servants nor ministers
had much experience of managing anything, they necessarily had to rely
heavily on their consultants for ideas and reassurance. Their consultants,
however, did not tell them that they similarly lacked expertise in the one
major area that this new kind of centralized public sector required above all
others: managing professionals. They therefore resorted to the methods
that had been devised to measure and improve the performance and pro-
ductivity of manual and routine service workers, and applied them to all
the hospitals, schools, universities, police forces, prisons, courts, and old
people’s homes in the land.
Extravagant as his claims sometimes were, Taylor never contemplated
applying his methods to the management of professional tasks, let alone
the simultaneous management of all the public services in a country. No
management consultant could possibly have had any experience of such a
thing, since it existed nowhere in the United States.65 The closest parallels
were therefore with the Soviet Union, which had sought over the seven
decades of its existence, to manage an entire economy from the centre.
Over those decades the peculiar limitations and pathologies of their efforts
had slowly come to be recognized, by insiders as well as outsiders: political
manoeuvring to manipulate the measures set, and after they had been deter-
mined, changing behaviour to conform precisely with the measure, and
ignoring everything that was not measured, and falsifying their reports of
their own true resources and capabilities. Rewards flowed to those who best
knew how to manipulate the measures and trumpet their achievements,
and it was in everyone’s interest to be economical with the truth. Russia
was thereby converted into a nation of dissemblers, with an all-powerful
but misinformed centre surrounded by a conspiracy of misinformation or
silence. Planned goals were in fact being fulfilled and over-fulfilled to the
very last days of the regime.66 Gorbachev’s glasnost was probably less a con-
cession to popular opinion than a final desperate attempt by Soviet leaders
to discover the true facts about their economy.
As long as the work being done was simple, straightforward, and unidi-
mensional, like shovelling ore which Taylor first measured, or like the tasks
the Soviet managers encountered in the early stages of industrialization,
such management controls seemed to work. The moment it was applied to
multidimensional tasks, where several criteria of good performance may be
applied simultaneously, or where the criteria might shift during the per-
formance of a task, or to tasks that required the co-ordination of several dif-
ferent kinds of expertise, the quality of the product or service was distorted
and deteriorated. The Soviets themselves seem to have recognized the
problem, and relaxed or removed these controls in industries that they
thought to be absolutely vital to their physical survival, most notably avia-
tion and military hardware.67 Ideological considerations, however, pre-
cluded the relaxation of control over the rest of the economy, and the
Soviets therefore struggled for many decades to solve the problem of incor-
porating technological innovations, dependent on highly qualified R&D
personnel, into normally planned production. Had they been able to solve
this problem, the Soviet Union, it seems safe to say, would be with us still.
Thatcher and her ministers, of course, only sought to impose centralized

command management on the public sector, not on the entire economy,
so the resemblance is only a partial one. Nevertheless, within the public
sector their reforms were in some respects even more ambitious than those
of the Soviet Union, since they were imposed on services that had long
depended on highly qualified personnel, with strong professional identities
and long traditions of self-government, and who had in the past them-
selves been trusted to define the standards to which they ought to work.
There is no reason to suppose that as these professionals have been sub-
jected to centralized command management that they have escaped its
pathologies. On the contrary, there is evidence from a number of directions
that they are already quite far advanced. Higher educational institutions,
for instance, plan, rehearse, and conspire ahead of their audits.68 On the
basis of analogy with the divisions of a large multi-divisional industrial
firm whose departments have ‘outputs’ that can be planned, the govern-
ment expects all university departments to have ‘plans’. Academics there-
fore devote time and skill to preparing them, knowing that they are a
calculated and time-consuming deceit, and have little or no bearing what-
ever on how they or any of their colleagues subsequently work.69 Only
items that are measured receive any attention. Thus tutorials, which were
once considered the most important and distinctive part of English univer-
sity education, the jewel in their crown, were never mentioned in any gov-
ernment directive, and accordingly were allowed to fall by the wayside,
except perhaps at Oxford and Cambridge. The pedagogical pros and cons of
doing so were never even discussed.
None of those subject to this academic command management could
ever publicly refer to any deterioration in teaching standards, since that
would have been to betray one’s colleagues, and put at risk the incentive
payments the government offered. In the Soviet manner, the government
claimed, all the while, that standards were improving, and devised an
authentically Soviet statistic (one that can be manipulated to show success
in whatever it purports to measure) to support its argument: the rising pro-
portion of first and upper second-class degrees. Trow, a most sympathetic
foreign observer, expressed his astonishment. After noting, in the Dainton
Commission’s report, that over 23 years from 1972/1973 to 1995/1996,
that ‘the average amount of recurrent income per student had fallen by two
thirds’, and after personally witnessing ‘impoverished libraries, student/
staff ratios that have doubled or tripled from the norms of the 1970s, long
deferred maintenance of capital plant, more students working rather than
reading, and the loss of valued colleagues due to early retirement,’ he was
amazed to note that ‘neither academics or vice-chancellors complained
about any serious decline in standards.’ Indeed ‘many vice-chancellors
claim that standards and performance are higher than ever.’70 This is surely
a remarkable achievement and surpasses any of those of the Stakhanovites
in Russia. It makes one wonder the ‘heights that might be scaled’ if the cuts
were to continue indefinitely. The private comments of academics, of
course, told quite another story, so there is now a sharp contrast between
what is said publicly, and what is said privately, a schizophrenia that was of
course endemic in Soviet Russia.
School teachers have found it more difficult to prepare for school audits
and the unannounced visitations of inspectors, but they have taken other
steps to defend themselves from instant judgements of OFSTED inspectors.
Just as Soviet managers declined to improve their products lest it affect the
output by which their performance was assessed, so English teachers have
been found directing their students away from more difficult core sub-
jects to peripheral subjects, where passing marks are easier to obtain. Many
teachers claimed that cheating had become ‘institutionalized’ in both sec-
ondary and primary schools, especially in coursework, with teachers help-
ing pupils with their examined work. By 2006 it had become so widespread
that coursework examinations were abolished.71 A few teachers have been
found disclosing the questions in written examinations to their students, or
in some cases amending their pupils’ completed exam papers.72
NHS hospitals have been found doing similar things. Since their perfor-
mance is measured by the length of their waiting lists, they reduced them by
concentrating on the simpler cases, or by reassigning patients to the list if
they fail to keep an appointment, or by keeping two lists.73 Only three out of
41 NHS Trusts produced ‘completely trustworthy’ figures of waiting lists
according to an Audit Commission report in 2003, though it found hard
evidence of deliberate misrepresentation in only three of the remaining 38.
Ambulance services are evaluated by their response times, and a survey by
the Commission for Health Improvement found that accurate figures were
‘very rare’. While it accused only a few of deliberate falsification, misrepre-
sentation was apparently common – indeed the norm. Only three were
found to have produced accurate figures, while the others had in various
ways manipulated the timing apparatus or the records. In the best Soviet
manner, some ambulance services were found to have responded to emer-
gency calls even before the calls had been made.74 Analogous performance
measures, clear-up rates, or response rates or numbers of police per inhabi-
tant were used to evaluate the police, which seem to make police stations
peculiarly reluctant to record any crimes that are difficult to solve.75 News
items detailing various scams of this kind in public services are now
routine. British public services may have had less experience than the
Russians at the arts of confusing the command centres of the state, but
they have evidently been learning fast, and proving themselves no less
adept.
As in the Soviet Union, the government’s predictable response has been
to make an example of the few unfortunates who happen to have been dis-
covered in the act. The headmaster who had corrected what he called the
‘silly mistakes’ of his 11-year old pupils in an examination received a three-

month prison sentence.76 The NHS chief executive has ‘warned that the
misreporting of figures was inexcusable and carried serious consequences’.
He meant of course, serious consequences for the perpetrators, overlooking
those for his own attempts to manage the service. As in the Soviet Union,
little attention has been paid to the effects of managerial methods which
give every performance-rated subordinate an incentive to conceal the true
situation, or to understand why hospitals, schools, universities, and law
firms, previously of good character, would want to start presenting false
information about themselves.
The conspiracy of silence has probably been less successfully maintained
in Britain than it was in the Soviet Union, partly because there are more
whistle-blowers and more media outlets, partly because cross-societal com-
parative research provides periodic reality checks, and also no doubt because
of the professional integrity of those carrying out the audits. Nonetheless,
there must now remain a doubt in every superiors’ or observers’ mind about
the reported ‘achievements’ of any British public service. In the future, we
may safely predict enormous improvements, by all the official indices, in
Britain’s educational achievements, its scientific research, its education, its
health care, its legal services, its policing, which few in the service will ever
publicly deny.
Just as centralization required the construction of managerial hierarchies
of control, so both also entailed the replacement of trust, and of internal-
ized collective ethics transmitted informally across generations, by explicit
rules, controls, incentives and sanctions. This necessarily followed from the
attacks on trade unions and professions since both were repositories and
resolute defenders of collegial customs and precedents. To the Thatcher
governments these customs and precedents were no more than restrictive
practices, those of the professions being rather more cleverly camouflaged
than those of unions. In handling both, Mrs Thatcher assumed that five-
yearly parliamentary elections, cross-wired though they invariably are with
numerous unrelated issues, gave her governments the right to interfere in
professions’ and unions’ domestic affairs. In fact, she often seemed to
assume that she herself could better represent the opinions of rank and file
professionals and trade unionists than the leaders of their own collective
bodies and might therefore appeal over their heads to liberate the rank and
file from their collective constraints imposed on them. Once professionals
and trade unionists were free to behave as rational economic actors, they
could then be offered the same incentives, rewards and punishments as are
offered in every free market, and public services could then be managed as
efficiently and economically as the private sector to the ultimate benefit of
the taxpayer.
The logic was impeccable, provided one accepted the assumption that
the public services like the National Health Service, legal aid, universities
and schools, the armed forces, the police had never benefited in the past
from any distinctive kind of professional ethic or commitment, and had
only suffered from the restrictive practices which the indolent, unambi-
tious, status-conscious majority imposed on their more energetic and entre-
preneurial colleagues. Whether her assumption was correct is not easy to
determine, for just as no one had been able to measure the past contri-
bution of professional ethics to any of these services, no one has measured
what the effect of debunking them, and persuading consultants, general
practitioners, civil servants, teachers, solicitors and others that they ought
to maximize their own individual financial rewards might be on the admin-
istration, or the cost, of their services. Hard evidence is rare, though in one
instance her assumption has been shown to be false. While hospital consul-
tants’ salaries have increased sharply, their productivity has fallen markedly.77
The effect on the class system which is our present concern, is somewhat
easier to observe since the displacement of professional goals that was long
familiar to Sovietologists has become common in contemporary Britain.
Doctors, teachers, professors, judges and others, who always fancied that
they might run things somewhat better than their colleagues, but had pre-
viously been restrained by professional etiquette, have been liberated from
their primary professional role by financial incentives and become man-
agers and superiors of their former colleagues. They no longer, therefore,
have to abide by and defend collective norms but as subordinate agents of
the state, may now instruct their former colleagues. Even the most highly
organized skilled workers were not immune to the same incentives and
prospects. One such case occurred in the early years of the Thatcher era at
the same Fawley oil refinery which we discussed above.
In the original negotiations, management had offered first-line super-
visors managerial status and conditions in the hope that they would then
control the work of their former colleagues as senior management wished.
Skilled workers, however, had insisted that their supervisors must remain
members of their union, and therefore, even though they might formally
be managers, would have to abide by, and respect the customary rules of
their trades. At the time, the workers seem to have won. Supervisors remained
union members, though management did not include them in any collec-
tive bargaining agreements. Over the following two decades, however, Esso
management evidently found this compromise to its advantage, for in 1974,
it decided to offer the same conditions to 130 warehousemen, and four years
later to the 70 craftsman fitters who maintained automated computer-
controlled equipment. Both accepted, and management evidently obtained
more direct control over the working practices of these two occupations.78
To their astonishment, in 1982, three years into the ‘Thatcher era’, the
Boilermakers, the ‘impregnable fortress of craft unionism’, requested the
same deal, and thereby declared their willingness to abandon their trade
rules, in return for a toehold on the managerial ladder, and the rewards,
status, opportunities and risks it entailed. In so doing, they were also, of

course, abandoning their obligations to members of their trade ‘not involved
in the situation’ which had been so important to them in the original
negotiations, as well as their obligations to their negotiating allies in other
trades at the refinery, and to other members of the working class at the
refinery. After recovering from their shock, management agreed, though
like the earlier deals with warehousemen and craftsman fitters, this ‘devil’s
bargain’, as the deal came to be called, aroused considerable dismay and
resentment among other workers at the refinery. When, shortly afterwards,
management announced that welders were to be similarly converted, the
entire refinery immediately came out on strike, and momentarily generated
something close to class solidarity in this corner of Hampshire, often known
as the ‘graveyard of unionism’.79 From a class point of view, it was a last
hurrah. Shortly thereafter, industrial relations legislation made such strikes
impossible.
Similar devil’s bargains were observable in many professions and trades,
though seldom as spontaneous and voluntary as the boilermakers’ seems to
have been. In other cases, there was usually some form of duress, as there
was in the ‘Big Bang’, the City of London’s devil’s bargain. In the public
sector, the bargains were always imposed. Like that of the boilermakers,
they involved the exchange of corporate self-regulation for the chance of
increased incomes. General practitioners or their practices were rewarded
according to the number of patients they saw or diagnostic tests they admin-
istered. Professors were given merit payments to distinguish them from
their less deserving colleagues, and their departments rewarded for the
number of first-class honours and PhDs they awarded, or the number of
their students, or the number of articles their members published, or the
number of grants they received, and school teachers for the examination
results of their pupils.
Cumulatively, these devil’s bargains helped to define contemporary class-
less Britain, and distinguish it from its more class-ridden predecessor, where
both professional and manual occupations had sought to prevent external
assessment of the quality of their work, and worked to collegial standards
of conduct which they had absorbed during their practice-based training,
and which they were subsequently entrusted to enforce on each other. No
doubt, as critics frequently observed, the trust was often misplaced, but the
merits or demerits of regulating work by one means or the other are not
here the issue, and anyway would require detailed and difficult analyses of
specific cases. Here, we only wish to note how the subordination of civil
society’s ‘little commonwealths’ and ‘little republics’ by a highly central-
ized state imposing managerial controls, has undermined the internalized
and collectively enforced ethics common in class-conscious England and
replaced them with competitive measures of individual performance which
any customer, manager, or minister, can understand and reward.80
A final question about Orwell’s ‘wild ride into the darkness’
‘The fact has got to be faced’, Orwell observed, ‘that to abolish class-distinc-
tions means abolishing a part of yourself. … Perhaps’, he went on, ‘this
class breaking business isn’t so simple as it looked! On the contrary, it is
wild ride into the darkness, and it may be that at the end of it the smile
will be on the face of the tiger.’ We have now, however, had a little time to
become accustomed to this ‘darkness’ and to discern some at least of its fea-
tures, as I have tried to show. One may still reasonably wonder, however,
what its impact might be on England’s social order as a whole.
This not an easy task because there is no available theory or historical
baseline against which we might assess and understand England’s social
order. The English have never been particularly interested in identifying its
peculiarities, being something they have rather taken for granted. Almost
all of the comparative research cited earlier to document the distinctive
form of their workplace relationships was the work of a foreign scholar.
Economists are ill-inclined, and ill-equipped to identify a country’s institu-
tional and cultural peculiarities, and sociologists have been preoccupied by
theories of capitalist, or industrial or Fordist, or modern or post-modern or
post-Fordist societies as a whole, and then with ‘globalization’. None of
these are much help when we try to detect and understand the full impact
of classlessness.
If one were to try to construct a makeshift marker, one would have to
begin with some well-recognized facts. England’s governmental institutions
are among the oldest on the planet, and it is the only country whose con-
stitution remains unwritten. It is the only society whose police are gener-
ally unarmed, the only one whose trade unions enjoyed ‘immunities’ and
operated outside the law for more than a century, and settled their disputes
with employers without written agreements. Its industrial enterprises were
long distinguished from others by low levels of managerial supervision, and
its governments regulated them with minimal resort to the law. Until the
Thatcher reforms, its universities were the most autonomous in the world,
and its professions assumed powers that were elsewhere subject to state
regulation, and often allowed to organize their practices, or the services
in which they worked, more or less as they wished. By any impartial cal-
culation, these things indicate that England was once a high trust society,
probably the highest trust society of all.
We may next add three more reasonably well-established historical facts,
first, that England has been a society where the authority of the parents
and the ties of the extended family have long been weak, where religious
institutions have long been in decline, and where formal educational pro-
vision has been, relative to its wealth, backward.81 Hence it has probably
relied rather less than many other societies on three traditional pillars of
social order – family, church and school. There may be other modern societies
which also have depended as little on one or other of these three pillars,
but if one were somehow or other able to devise an aggregate score, it
seems likely that England would be found among those societies that has
depended on them least. England’s social order therefore poses something
of a conundrum, since it was also long distinguished by a low-level of violent
social conflict and public disorder despite appalling social conditions and
inequalities which, until the Second World War at least, might, in the eyes
of some observers, including Orwell, have provoked a revolution.82
I have no intention of trying to unravel this puzzling, counter-intuitive
combination. However, the present investigation prompts speculation
about one strand within it, namely how far the corporate institutions that
maintained order in their workplaces might have contributed to the wider
social order. Jenkins, the most eloquent and perceptive analyst of the cen-
tralization of power during and since the Thatcher era and its behavioural
consequences, focused his attention on the decline in the autonomy of
local hospitals, neighborhood schools, women’s institutes, trades’ councils,
police stations and parish councils.83 However, these institutions could not
possibly have exercised as much influence on English social life as profes-
sions and trade unions which were responsible for so many school-leavers
as they entered the labour force, and thereafter exercised a continuing
influence on them through their working lives. The educational and eco-
nomic merits or demerits of these institutions are not here at issue. The
only question here is whether by authorizing the old to teach and dis-
cipline the young to be reliable, to accept responsibility, to treat others
with respect, and to behave themselves as their elders deemed right and
proper as a condition of becoming a member of their trade or profession,
they might have contributed to England’s social order more generally. If
they did, it follows that as the authority of these corporate institutions have
been discredited and weakened, we might expect some dislocation and dis-
turbance in the existing social order. One of its traditional props has been
dislodged, and since there is no sign that either the family and church were
simultaneously coming to play a more important role in their lives, a dis-
proportionate burden was inevitably, and rather suddenly, imposed on
schools and the police.
A few straws in the wind lend support to this line of argument, though
they fall far short of proof. One very general indication of some kind of
social dislocation was the findings of an ICM poll in 2004 that some 51%
of the British population wished to emigrate, to ‘relocate in search of a
better life abroad’, because ‘they do not like the way Britain has become.’84
One of the grounds mentioned by respondents was the increasing level of
crime. Some years earlier England and Wales had in fact topped a study of
rates of crime reported by victims in 11 industrial societies, had become the
European leader in the number of juveniles arrested and sentenced,
and was imprisoning a higher proportion of her citizens than most EU
countries, all of which also seem consistent with the view that there had
been some kind of dislocation of an accepted social order, especially at the
point where among young men enter the labour force, for it is they who
disproportionately commit crimes and receive custodial sentences.85 Two of
the six measures used to rank the well-being of children in 21 industrial
countries in a 2007 UNICEF report, namely ‘family and peer relationships’,
and ‘behaviours and risks’ point in the same direction. Britain was last on
both.86
In recent times, professional work settings appear to have had particular
difficulty in maintaining order. In the past, professionals seem to have
been able to rely some deference from their clients, who were therefore
inclined to trust and follow their advice. Successive governments have,
however, sought to replace deferential clients with critical customers who
would evaluate the services offered, and complain whenever they thought
them less than adequate. In recent years, some ‘customers’ have done so
violently. Since there are no historical statistics, one cannot demonstrate a
transition, and can only wonder whether there were too few violent attacks
on professionals in the past to obtain recognition and documentation as a
social problem. In 2001–2002, the National Audit Office (NAO), found
there were 95,500 physical attacks on NHS staff, principally on nursing
staff, though it suspected that this was below the true figure, since more
than a third of those in accident departments went unreported. Subsequent
national surveys of NHS staff supported their suspicion. In 2006, 12% of
NHS staff reported violence or physical abuse from patients or their rela-
tives over the preceding 12 months, which would mean – if each of these
had been attacked only once – the true figure would be well over 100,000.87
The authors of the NAO report attributed this violence to ‘higher patient
expectations’ and ‘frustrations due to increased waiting times’, or ‘waiting
room rage’ as one newspaper dubbed it.88 Some reports suggest an analo-
gous phenomenon of ‘classroom rage’. The Teacher Support Network for
England estimated – by extrapolating from a Scottish survey – there had
been some 85,000 incidents of verbal and physical abuse of teachers in
2002 which it attributed to ‘the way the professional role of teachers has
been diminished in recent years.’89 A more recent, representative survey
from Scotland suggested that the problem might be less serious than first
thought, since ‘only’ 4% of Scottish teachers reported ‘physical aggression’
towards them ‘once or twice a week’.90 Nonetheless, there is clearly a
problem, albeit of unknown dimensions, in England, since teachers’ unions
have welcomed initiatives to bring police into schools.91
One further straw in the wind is that post-Thatcher governments felt it
necessary to address problems of social order that were not previously con-
sidered matters of public policy. This started in 1993 with Mr Major’s ‘back
to basics’ initiative. It is time, he said, to get back ‘to self-discipline and
respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accept responsibility for
yourself and your family’, adding ‘and no shuffling it off on the state.’92
But whereas he hoped that the government might encourage civil society
to mend its ways, his successor, Mr Blair, asserted a greater role for the
state, launching in 2006 with much fanfare and media moments a ‘respect
agenda’, which incorporated a host of ad hoc measures initiated over pre-
vious years, all of which had progressively extended the summary powers
of the police to deal with ‘unacceptable behaviour’ of various kinds, such
as abusive language, truancy, ‘gangs hanging around outside’, loud music,
graffiti, littering, spitting, hooliganism, ‘yobbish’ and ‘unruly’ behaviour.93
The widespread intuition that the state was advancing further into matters
that had hitherto been left to families and to civil society prompted wide-
spread references to the ‘nanny state’.
In this investigation we have considered the ‘little commonwealths and
little republics’ that the English had established in so many work settings,
primarily as nurseries of class, but if we were to consider them solely as lesser
forms of government, then they may well deserve recognition as quiet but
effective instruments of social order, with their own long-established and
well-enforced ‘respect agendas’. By sharply reducing their influence, recent
governments have therefore not only undermined the class system, but
simultaneously launched the English into what is for them an unfamiliar
experiment, Orwell’s ‘wide ride’, in which social order must depend less on
civil society, and more on the state, and in particular on two professions it
has centralized and subjected to its managerial control – teachers and the
police.
Notes
Chapter 1 An English Obsession, Myth and Mystery

1 p.208, George Orwell, ‘England your England’, pp.192–224, in England Your
England and Other Essays, Secker & Warburg, London, 1953.
2 p.170, David Cannadine, Class in Britain, Yale University Press, New Haven,
1998.
3 Rosemary Crompton et al., eds, Renewing Class Analysis, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000.
4 p.149, Mike Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation, Open University
Press, Buckingham, 2000.
5 Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1998.
6 James G. March, Lee S. Sproull and Michael Tamuz, ‘Learning from Samples of
One or Fewer’, pp.1–13, Organization Science, Vol. 2, No. 1, Feb. 1991.
7 p.2, Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945, Vol. 1, Ambition, Love, Politics,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973.
8 pp.130, 189, 210, ibid.
9 p.115, ibid.
10 pp.1, 42, 787, ibid.
11 Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Summit, New
York, 1983; Jilly Cooper, Class: A View from Middle England, Corgi, London, 1980.
12 pp.30–2, Benjamin DeMott, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t Think
Straight About Class, Morrow, New York, 1990.
13 England has grown over the past century relative to the other countries of the
British Isles, especially Ireland and least relative to Scotland. In 1891 77% of the
total population of Great Britain lived in England and Wales, nearly 13% in
Ireland as a whole, and nearly 11% in Scotland. p.123, Table 36, Registrar-
General, Great Britain, Census of England and Wales, Vol. 4, General Report,
HMSO, London, 1893.
14 pp.100, 102, R.R. Alford, Party and Society: Anglo-American Democracies, Rand
McNally, Chicago, 1963. The index ‘was computed by subtracting the percent-
age of non-manual workers voting for “Left” parties from the percentage of
manual workers voting for “Right” parties.’
15 pp.780, 782, 784, Reeve D. Vanneman, ‘U.S. and British Perceptions of Class’,
American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 85, No. 4, Jan. 1980. The italics are
Vanneman’s.
16 p.113, David L. Weakliem and Anthony F. Heath, ‘The Secret Life of Class
Voting: Britain, France and the United States since the 1930s’, pp.97–136, in
Geoffrey Evans, ed., The End of Class Politics? Class Voting in Comparative Context,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999.
17 Utilizing cross-European voting data in the 1960s, von Beyme similarly found
Britain the best example of a country ‘in which class conflict is more dominant
than religious, language or regional differences’, but noted that while class
voting was more common in Britain than in central and south eastern Europe, it
was less common than in Scandinavia. pp.278, 288–9, Klaus von Beyme, Political
Parties in Western Democracies, trans by Eileen Martin, Gower, Aldershot, c. 1985.
342
Notes to pages 7–11 343
In their analysis of voting in 20 societies over the post-war period, Nieuwbeerta

and De Graaf found the U.S. and Canada had the lowest levels of class voting,
and Britain, along with Scandinavia, the highest. p.31, Paul Nieuwbeerta and
Nan Dirk De Graaf, ‘Traditional Class Voting in Twenty Post War Societies’;
pp.23–49, in Evans, 1999, op. cit.
18 p.30, Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice et al., How Britain Votes,
Pergamon, Oxford, 1985. By 1992, it had returned to the level of 1935.
19 Reproduced p.57, Masao Watanabe, ‘Class Differences and Educational
Opportunities in Japan’, pp.49–71, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, Vol. 29,
1997.
20 For instance, in 1978 42% of a sample of chief executives in six continental
European societies agreed with the statement: ‘The average British manager is
too conscious of his social class to be able to motivate his workers.’ p.21, Chief
Executive Monthly, March 1978. More recently, a survey of opinion in 13 coun-
tries found 30% ‘strongly disagreed’ with the statement that ‘Britain was a class-
less society’. pp.80, 84, Robin Ratcliffe, Through Other Eyes 2: How the World Sees
the United Kingdom, British Council, London, 2000.
21 James A. Davis, ‘British and American Attitudes’, pp.88–114, British Social
Attitudes: The 1986 Report, Gower, Aldershot, 1986.
22 p.127, Geoffrey Evans, ‘Class conflict and inequality’, pp.123–42, International
Social Attitudes: the 10th BSA Report, Dartmouth, Aldershot, 1993.
23 pp.130, 133, ibid.
24 p.139, ibid.
25 The other third called themselves middle class. pp.7–9, Andrew Adonis and
Stephen Pollard, A Class Act: the Myth of Britain’s Classless Society, Hamish
Hamilton, London, 1997.
26 p.3, ibid.
27 W. Müller and W. Karle, Social Selection in Educational Systems in Europe, ISA
Research Committee on Social Stratification, Madrid, 1986; quoted p.266,
A.H. Halsey, A.F. Heath, J.M. Ridge, Origins and Destinations: Family, Class and
Education in Modern Britain, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980.
28 ‘British industry is more open than that of any of the other three countries
…. alone of the four countries, the man without higher education or family con-
nections is still not weeded out at the start of the managerial-career race …
Managerial promotion above plant level is not predetermined by educational or
class criteria.’ pp.293, 315, David Granick, Managerial Comparisons of Four
Developed Countries: France, Britain, United States and Russia, MIT, Cambridge,
1972; David Granick, Equality of Promotional Opportunities in British Industry, Aims
of Industry, 1979.
29 Hiroshi Mannari, Japanese Business Leaders, University of Tokyo, 1974.
30 pp.104–27, 153, 179, 192, Hiroshi Ishida, Social Mobility in Contemporary Japan:
Educational Credentials, Class and the Labour Market in a Cross-National Perspective,
Macmillan, London, Stanford, 1993.
31 p.124, Youseff Cassis, Big Business: The European Experience in the Twentieth
Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997.
32 pp.11–38, Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in
Industrial Society, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1959.
33 p.575, Thomas Fox and S.M. Miller, ‘Occupational Stratification and Mobility’,
pp.574–81, in Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds, Class, Status and
Power: Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
London, 1967, 2nd Edition. The fourth country in their comparisons was the
344 Notes to pages 11–14
Netherlands. The main point of this study was to show that aggregate mobility
rates might hide considerable differences in rates between different classes.
Britain, for instance, had the lowest rate of mobility into the elite.
34 Followed by Hungary, Ireland and Poland. pp.195, 372, Robert Erikson and John
Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux: Class Mobility in Industrial Societies, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1992. In total mobility, England and Wales seemed almost always
to be the median case over the birth cohorts from 1905 to 1945, though always
ahead of Germany. p.78, ibid.
35 pp.220–1, P.H. Lindert, ‘Towards a Comparative History of Income and Wealth
Inequality’, pp.212–31, in Y.S. Brenner, Hartmut Kaelbe and Mark Thomas, eds,
Income Distribution in Historical Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1991.
36 p.220, ibid.
37 Robert J. Lampman, The Share of Top Wealth-Holders in National Wealth,
1922–1956, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1962.
38 pp.95, 147–8, W.D. Rubinstein, Wealth and Inequality in Britain, Faber & Faber,
London, 1986.
39 p.22, Edward N. Woolf, Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America
and What Can be Done About It, A Twentieth Century Fund Report, New York,
1995.
40 p.33, A.F. Shorrocks, ‘U.K. Wealth Distribution: Current Evidence and Future
Prospects’, in E. Woolf, ed., International Comparisons of the Distribution of
Household Wealth, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987. He went on, it must
be said, to cast a sceptical eye on the way these data were collected, and to
advise caution when interpreting them, but he did not reject them.
41 Tivey calculated that 23.2% of the labour force was employed in nationalized
industries, but his figure excluded the National Health Service, the BBC and
other public bodies. p.13, Leonard Tivey, Nationalization in British Industry,
Jonathan Cape, London, 1966. Dunleavy and Husbands give a figure of 24% for
both nationalized enterprises and public services in 1961, rising to 31% in 1982.
The latter rose as the former fell. p.21, Patrick Dunleavy and Christopher
T. Husbands, British Democracy at the Crossroads: Voting and Party Competition in
the 1980s, Allen & Unwin, London, 1985.
42 p.65, Harold Lydall and John B. Lansing, ‘A Comparison of the Distribution of
Personal Income and Wealth in the United States and Great Britain’, pp.43–67,
American Economic Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 1, March, 1959. In 1972, 32% of
respondents in a national random sample were found to live in council houses.
p.44, Heath et al., 1985, op. cit.
43 p.69, Jeffrey G. Williamson, Did British Capitalism Breed Inequality?, Allen &
Unwin, Boston, 1985.
44 which was ‘combined with a more unequal distribution of wealth, the latter
being rather more marked than the former.’ pp.64–7, ibid.
45 p.52, Watanabe, op. cit.
46 p.26, A.B. Atkinson, The Economics of Inequality, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983.
47 p.149, Rubinstein, op. cit.
48 pp.69–71, Andrea Brandolini and Nicola Rossi, ‘Income Distribution and Growth
in Industrial Countries’, pp.69–106, in Vito Tanzi and Ke-young Chan, eds,
Income Distribution and High-Quality Growth, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998.
49 J. Fritzell, ‘Income Inequality Trends in the 1980s: A Five Country Comparison’,
Luxembourg Income Study, Working Paper 73, 1992. A number of other studies,
coming to the same conclusion that income increased sharply in the 1980s, are
to be found in A. Goodman, P. Johnson and S. Webb, Income Inequality in the

U.K., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997.
50 p.113, Heath and Weakliem, op. cit.
51 such as Jilly Cooper, whose work has already been mentioned; Noel Annan, who
in his 1990 memoirs referred to class as ‘the referent in English society which
supplies so many clues to English behaviour’, and eloquently demonstrated the
point in discussing ‘our age’, meaning all those who came of age and went to
university between 1919 and 1951. p.319, Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a
Generation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1990; Paxman decided that ‘the
English are class-obsessed’. p.154, Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a
People, Michael Joseph, London, 1998; Epstein argued that ‘The English had a
stricter class system, and one that lasted for a longer period than any other.’
p.206, Joseph Epstein, Snobbery: The American Version, Houghton Mifflin, Boston,
2002; and Ferdinand Mount claimed that ‘Britain stands nearly alone in main-
taining to this day so sharp a division between the Uppers and Downers’, as he
called its two present-day classes. p.316, Ferdinand Mount, Mind the Gap: The
New Class Divide in Britain, Short Books, London, 2004.
52 p.77, Vol. 1, George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George
Orwell, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970.
53 quoted p.162, George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell,
Minerva Press, London, 1966.
54 Breen and Luijkx reported ‘a widespread tendency to greater fluidity in the
eleven countries they compared’, but added that ‘Britain is the sole clear excep-
tion to this.’ p.73, Richard Breen and Ruud Luijkx, ‘Social Mobility in Europe
between 1970 and 2000’, pp.37–73, in Richard Breen, ed., Social Mobility in
Europe, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.
55 As for example Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, The Death of Class, Sage,
London, 1996. Gunn and Bell thought that ‘By the 1990s it became possible to
speak of the end of the middle classes as a recognizable entity … the concept of
middle classes becomes meaningless when the institutions, way of life and
values which defined the group no longer pertain.’ pp.224, 228, Simon Gunn
and Rachel Bell, Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, Phoenix, London, 2002.
56 Peter Bauer, Class on the Brain: The Cost of a British Obsession, Centre for Policy
Studies, London, 1997, 1st Edition, 1978.
57 pp.5–9, ibid.
58 pp.22–4, ibid.
59 Stein Ringen, ‘The great British myth: why the claims of continuing class
inequality fail to take account of social change’, pp.3–4, The Times Literary
Supplement, January 23rd, 1998.
Chapter 2 Lessons from Comparative Theories

1 Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Anatomy of the Communist System, Praeger,
New York, 1957; Milovan Djilas, Fall of the New Class: A History of Communism’s
Self-Destruction, ed. by Vasilije Kalezié, trans by John Loud, Knopf, New York,
1998.
2 For an explicit statement to that effect see his review of Jack Common’s, The
Freedom of the Streets, p.336, Vol. 1, Orwell, The Collected Essays, op. cit.
3 ‘The Closed Circle of the Privileged’, pp.145–66, Djilas, 1998, op. cit.
4 pp.174–202, ibid.
5 Mikhail Gorbachev ‘A Speech on the Tenth Anniversary of the coup of 16th August
1991’, BBC Monitoring, 16th August 2001, reported in Russia Weekly, 17th August
2001.
6 Most notably in Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class, trans
by Eric Mosbacher, Doubleday, New York, 1984. Other Soviet accounts are
discussed below.
7 One of the more important non-Russian accounts is that in Martin Malia, The
Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991, Free Press, New York,
1994, since he showed that the history of the class was integral to the history of
the regime. See also Martin Malia, ‘The Nomenklatura Capitalists: who’s running
Russia now?’, The New Republic, May 22nd, 1995; Reddaway and Glinski are
mildly critical of Djilas though only because they thought he did not sufficiently
acknowledge the nomenklatura ‘as both a sociological and a cultural entity’, and
they constantly refer to it thereafter. pp.103–4, 266–7, Peter Reddaway and
Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against
Democracy, U.S. Institute for Peace, Washington, D.C., 2001. A[o]slund argued
that the nomenklatura obstructed not only Gorbachev’s restructuring but also
many post-Soviet reforms. pp.44, 151, Anders Åslund, Building Capitalism: The
Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2002.
8 pp.159–62, 177–8, 193–6, Jaroslav Krejc̆í and Pavel Machonin, Czechoslovakia,
1918–92: A Laboratory for Social Change, St. Martin’s Press, Basingstoke, 1996.
Starski’s analysis of socialist Poland’s ruling class was remarkably similar to that
of Djilas, though quite independent of it. See ‘The Making of the Class of State
Owners’, pp.13–24, Stanislaw Starski, Class Struggle in Classless Poland, South End
Press, Boston, 1982.
9 p.136, Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, London, 1959.
10 pp.82, 115, 305, 312, ibid.
11 The idea that civil society was founded on private property ownership may be
traced back to Rousseau’s Discourse of the Origins of Inequality published in 1755.
Novak is one of many contemporary observers who assume that business corpo-
rations were its first organized bodies. p.16, Michael Novak, The Future of the
Corporation, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C. 1996.
12 pp.11, 148, 150–68, Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order: Social
Stratification in Capitalist and Communist Societies, Paladin, St. Albans, 1972. He
argued that it was different from the dominant class of capitalist societies
because it is ‘continually replenishing itself from below’, and therefore ‘melts
over and spills into the people.’
13 The sentence continues ‘…but only at the cost of creating a system of political
domination, which has altered the character of social exploitation rather than
necessarily diminishing it.’ p.294, Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of the
Advanced Societies, Hutchinson, London, 1973.
14 pp.148–50, Parkin, op. cit.; p.232, Giddens, op. cit.
15 p.46, John H. Goldthorpe, in collaboration with Catriona Llewellyn and Clive
Payne, Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1980.
16 Stratification and inequalities had been copiously documented, even by Soviet
sociologists. Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard B. Dobson, ‘Social Stratification
and Sociology in the Soviet Union’, pp.114–85, Survey, Vol. 88, No. 3, Summer,
1973. It was confirmed by later research such as Gordon Marshall, Svetlana
Sydorenko and Stephen Roberts, ‘Intergenerational Mobility in Communist

Russia’, pp.1–27, Work, Employment & Society, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1995.
17 p.87, Walter Müller, Paul Lüttinger, Wolfgang König and Wolfgang Karle, ‘Class
and Education in Industrial Nations’, pp.61–89, in Max Haller, ed., Class
Structure in Europe: New Findings from East-West Comparisons of Social Structure and
Mobility, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, N.Y., 1990.
18 pp.109, 147, Giddens, op. cit. Neither Parkin nor Giddens therefore spent much
time discussing politics in capitalist societies. Giddens formally acknowledged
the role of political power, and his notion of ‘structuration’ provided an oppor-
tunity to demonstrate its significance. He made nothing of it. The ‘mediate
factor’ prompting structuration, in his view, was the rate of social mobility, and
‘the proximate factors’ were the division of labour, authority relationships in the
workplace and consumption patterns. pp.107–12, Giddens, op. cit.
19 Raynor, for instance, suggested that the sense of class unity was encouraged by
Pitt’s introduction of income tax, by the Great Reform Act, by the campaign for
the repeal of the Corn Laws, and by the reform of the Civil Service in 1870.
pp.16–21, John Raynor, The Middle Class, Longmans Green, London, 1969.
Gunn and Bell also emphasized the importance of the Great Reform Act, which
‘institutionalized the division between middle and working classes, and of the
movement against the Corn Laws. They also gave ‘a central role in the creation
of middle class identity’ to the disabilities under which Non-Conformists suf-
fered, to the evangelical movement within the Church of England, and to ‘a
whole new set of institutions … created in the course of the nineteenth century
which helped the middle classes define who they were: the professions.’
pp.8–20, 45–7, Gunn and Bell, op. cit.
20 The apolitical legacy of later sociological theorists is trenchantly dissected in
Malia’s post-mortem on the failures of sociological theories of Soviet society.
Martin Malia, ‘From Under the Rubble, What?’ pp.89–106, Problems of Com-
munism, Vol. XLI, Jan.–Apr. 1992.
21 He went on to explain that ‘the concept of class within these two streams of
thought share a number of important features’, and reasonably added that
‘inside every left-wing Weberian there is a Marxist struggling to stay hidden.’
pp.29–35, Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.
22 One such example is his observation that ‘the laws and measures’ of the French
Second Republic ‘made the attack and resistance general, the talking point in
every cottage; they inoculated every village with the revolution, they made the
revolution a local matter and a matter for the peasants.’ Marx’s italics, p.119, Karl
Marx, The Class Struggles in France, in David Fernbach, ed., Surveys from Exile:
Political Writings, Vol. 2, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973.
23 pp.24–5, Dahrendorf, op. cit.
24 p.139, ibid. Djilas confessed that he was no exception to the general rule. ‘I still
had recourse to the Marxist standpoint and methodology … I was only capable
of revealing the incongruities of Communist realities with the help of visions,
prognostications, and pledges culled from Marxist holy writ.’ p.4, Milovan
Djilas, The Unperfect Society: Beyond the New Class, trans by Dorian Cooke,
Methuen, London, 1969.
25 Giddens mentioned a number of variations between capitalist societies, such as
the differing political contexts of their industrialization, the varying reactions
of traditional land-owning elites to it, and differences in the degree of white
collar unionization, but these are obiter dicta, and he did not demonstrate their
theoretical significance or their part in his theory of class ‘structuration’.

pp.146–8, 164–7, 188–92, Giddens, op. cit.
26 p.243, ibid.
27 Thirteen years later, Dahrendorf’s critique elicited a polite half-apology from
Djilas, who explained that the phrase ‘the new class’ should be taken as no more
than a conditional and conditioned term for the new privileged strata in the
so-called socialist countries…., p.6, Djilas, 1969, op. cit.
28 pp.221, 232, 242, Malcolm Hamilton and Maria Hirszowicz, Class and Inequality
in Pre-Industrial, Capitalist and Communist Societies, Wheatsheaf, Brighton, 1987.
His work was similarly dismissed in a later text. pp.152–6, John Scott, Stratifica-
tion and Power: Structures of Class, Status and Command, Polity, Cambridge, 1996.
29 Fiona Devine, Social Class in America and Britain, Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh, 1997.
30 For some examples see Neville Kirk, ed., Social Class and Marxism: Challenges and
Defences, Scolar, Aldershot, 1996.
31 pp.149–50, Savage, 2000, op. cit.
32 Neville Kirk, Labour and Society in Britain and the USA, 2 vols, Vol. 1, Capitalism,
custom and protest, 1780–1850, 1994; Roger Fagge, Power, Culture and Conflict in
the Coalfields: West Virginia and South Wales, 1900–1922, Manchester University
Press, Manchester, 1996.
33 p.339, Alex Inkeles and Peter H. Rossi, ‘National Comparisons of Occupational
Prestige’, pp.329–39, in Bendix and Lipset, 1967, op. cit.
34 p.318, Robert Hodge, Donald Treiman and Peter Rossi, ‘A Comparative Study of
Occupational Prestige’, pp.309–21, ibid.
35 pp.5–6, Donald J. Treiman, Occupational Prestige in Comparative Perspective,
Academic Press, New York, 1977.
36 London companies over the period studied were drawn from the trade of the
company’s name, and their orders of precedence therefore resembled occu-
pational prestige scales, except that they were real social entities, not artificial
statistical constructs. Michael Burrage and David Corry, ‘At Sixes and Sevens:
Occupational Status in the City of London from the Fourteenth to the
Seventeenth Century’, Vol. 46, No. 4, American Sociological Review, 1981.
37 Ishida, op. cit.
38 On the grounds that both had great economic inequalities, that both lacked the
legal, social and customary barriers between classes that were found in Eastern and
Western Europe, that both had familiar, non-deferential manners, and that both
shared a commitment to equality of opportunity. pp.311–31, Walter D. Connor,
Socialism, Politics and Equality: Hierarchy and Change in Eastern Europe and in
the U.S.S.R., Columbia, New York, 1979. Müller et al. made a similar effort
but were stymied by the fact that they continued to work with nine societies.
op. cit.
39 Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1997.
40 p.545, ibid.
41 pp.122, 523, ibid.
42 Instead he scored their responses to various questions about capitalism to dis-
cover ‘whether the average person in that location is ideologically closer to the
working class, the capitalist class or an ideologically neutral position between
these two poles’, and then fill all 12 class ‘locations.’ He did this at some cost in
consistency since he had already rejected ‘gradational’ notions of class in favour
of those that define class ‘relationally’, that is ‘by virtue of the social relations
which link it to other class locations’. Attitude scores, however, are ‘gradational’.
pp.30, 415, ibid.
43 p.57, ibid.
44 p.111, ibid.
45 pp.130–42, ibid.
46 p.67, ibid.
47 pp.431–8, ibid.
48 pp.429, 431, 437–40, ibid.
49 These variations are summarized in a single superb graphic on p.234, ibid.
50 p.200, ibid.
51 pp.200, 214, 216–17, 230, 233, ibid.
52 At one point, he says that his ‘empirical categories… can be interpreted in a
Weberian or hybrid manner’, so that ‘readers who are resolutely unconvinced
about the virtues of understanding classes in terms of exploitation can still
engage the empirical analyses of this book as investigations of classes differen-
tially situated with respect to life chances in the market.’ p.37, ibid.
53 pp.73, 429, 512–16, ibid.
54 p.429, ibid.
55 The issue is doubly interesting since he also found that Sweden’s higher class
consciousness was combined with a higher rate of mobility across the property
barrier than the U.S. He examined public employment at some length, though
not from this point of view. pp.430–8, 459–87, ibid.
56 He had no reason to address Djilas’s argument directly, since there were no
socialist or post-socialist societies in his study, and no ruling classes. In passing,
he acknowledged that ‘classes may exist in non-market societies’, and claimed
that this also was entirely consistent with Marxist class analysis. pp.35–6,
Wright, op. cit.
Chapter 3 What are Classes? And Who Forms and Dissolves

Them?
1 Schumpeter put these points better than anyone else. ‘Class members behave
toward one another in a fashion characteristically different from their conduct
toward members of other classes. They are in closer association with one
another; they understand one another better; they work more readily in concert;
they close ranks and erect barriers against the outside; they look out into the
same segment of the world, with the same eyes, from the same viewpoint, in the
same direction.’ pp.107–8, Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes,
New World, New York, 1971.
2 ‘By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of dis-
parate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experi-
ence and in consciousness, I do not see class as structure, nor even a category,
but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened)
in human relationships.’ p.9, E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working
Class, Victor Gollancz, London, 1965.
3 However, the most startling evidence that there is no necessary connection
between the level of inequality and class sentiment is the study of Machonin,
completed in Czechoslovakia, shortly before the Prague Spring of 1968. He
found that despite severe compression of income differentials between non-
manual and manual workers, with a mean differential of 1 to 1.5 or less, lifestyle
and cultural differences were still manifest. pp.127–8, 179–80, 204–5, Krejc̆í and
Machonin, op. cit.
4 pp.12, 185, 187, 196, Crompton et al., op. cit.
5 Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern
State, trans by Barbara and Robert North, Methuen, London, 1954.
6 p.15, Giovanni Sartori, ‘The Sociology of Parties: a critical review’, in Otto
Stammer, ed., Party Systems, Party Organizations and the Politics of the New Masses,
Institute of Political Science, Free University, Berlin, 1968.
7 p.169, Cannadine, op. cit. Others have come to the same conclusion. Vanneman,
for example, observed that the ‘sharper class division in British (versus American)
politics owes more to the structure of the party system than to the consciousness
of the voters… we ought to seek explanations of political behaviour directly in
the dynamics of political institutions.’ p.785, Vanneman, op. cit.
8 His questionnaire is reprinted pp.211–18, in T. Bottomore and M. Rubel, eds,
Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Penguin, Harmonds-
worth, 1971.
9 p.124, Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, International
Publishers, New York, 1963; pp.24–5, Dahrendorf, op. cit.
10 Charles E. McClelland, pp.101–2, ‘Escape from Freedom? Reflections on German
Professionalization, 1870–1933’, in Rolf Torstendahl and Michael Burrage, eds,
The Formation of Professions, Sage, London, 1989.
11 Novak is one of many who mistakenly assumed that business corporations were
the first collective institution of civil society. p.16, Michael Novak, The Future of
the Corporation, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., 1996.
12 It was the ‘national character’ of tramping that caused concern which surfaced in
Parliament in 1794, though it had then been ‘in existence for perhaps a
century’. pp.164–5, John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century
Industry, Croom Helm, London, 1981. Rule’s italics.
13 I will give just two British examples from dozens of others that might be given
from many countries. In the eighteenth century cutlery, file and paper trades,
Rule observed ‘combinations of workers … had brought contesting masters’ asso-
ciations into being’, and in paper manufacture ‘well-established unionism had
produced a counter-organization of employers’. pp.168, 174, ibid. In his compar-
ison of British and Swedish employers in the late twentieth century, Fulcher
decided that it is ‘to the character of the two countries labour movements that
we must turn for an explanation of the differences in their national employer
organization.’ p.310, James Fulcher, Labour Movements, Employers, and the State:
Conflict and Co-operation in Britain and Sweden, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991.
14 a point that Bourdieu formally acknowledged, but found it difficult to act on.
Another victim, one might say, of economic determinism. Pierre Bourdieu, The
State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, trans by Lauretta C. Clough,
Polity, Oxford, 1996.
15 The website of the IMA is www.investmentuk.org
16 As may be judged by some of their websites, the Association of Pension Fund
Managers and others, all of which are listed on the IMA site, ibid.; p.46, Albert
O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations,
and States, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970.
17 Savage, for example, concluded that an analysis by deciles of income and prop-
erty of the U.K. population ‘point unambiguously to the existence of a very
small class who earn their wealth from property, and a much larger class who
predominantly rely on income from their labour. He also concluded that, since
the gap between the median incomes of ‘associate professionals’ and ‘skilled
workers’ is greater than that between any other two occupational categories,
there is ‘some kind of a broad class division between managers, professionals
and administrators and white collar or manual workers. However, he himself
later showed considerable dispersion around these median incomes, which
increased between 1976 and 1990 when ‘the elite within every manual occupa-
tion earned more than the average professional employee.’ pp.51–2, 67, Savage,
2000, op. cit.
18 Through the hero of Coming Up for Air, Orwell described a road in the suburbs ‘a
prison with cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture chambers where
the poor little five-to-ten-a-weekers quake and shiver. Every one of them with a
boss twisting his tail and his wife riding him like a nightmare and his kids
sucking his blood like leeches.’ cited p.87, Gunn and Bell, op. cit.
19 Kirk succinctly reviewed many of the social distinctions that have been iden-
tified within the British working class. pp.214–19, Neville Kirk. Change, Con-
tinuity and Class: Labour in British Society, 1850–1920, Manchester University
Press, Manchester, 1998; Raynor decided that ‘whatever else the middle class is,
it is certainly not monolithic’, and much of his work is devoted to identifying
differences within it. p.7, Raynor, op. cit.
20 For him, these two approaches are of equal merit, and reconcilable. pp.492–6,
Wright, op. cit.
21 pp.39–42, 257, Goldthorpe et al., op. cit.
22 David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There,
Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000. He later identified a fundamental divide
between professionals and managers within ‘the educated class. ‘Bitter at the
Top’, New York Times, June 15th, 2004.
23 It included scientists and engineers, professors, poets, novelists, artists, actors,
designers, architects, think-tank researchers, programmers. pp.68–72, Richard
Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure,
Community and Everyday Life, Basic Books, New York, 2002.
24 Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, Cornell
University Press, Itaca, N.Y., 2000.
25 pp.62–114, Mount, op. cit.
Chapter 4 Class Formation in Two Russias

1 p.86, Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, Penguin, London, 1977.
2 p.119, Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth Century
Nobility, Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, New York, 1966.
3 In 1845, Nicholas I responded to pressure from the hereditary nobility, and
granted it only to 5th chin of the civil service. Ranks 11 and 13 were seldom
used, and number one reserved for the Foreign Minister, so there were in
practice only 11 ranks. p.347, Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From
the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, Princeton University Press, Princeton,
1961; p.64, Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899–1919, Fontana,
London, 1992.
4 p.21, Helju Aulik Bennett, ‘Evolution of the Meanings of Chin: An Intro-
duction to the Russian Institution of Rank Ordering and Niche Assignment
from the Time of Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks to the Bolshevik Revolution’,
pp.1–43, California Slavic Studies, Vol. 10, 1977.
5 p.286, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.

6 Although there are no measures of the rate of self-recruitment, one may rea-
sonably infer, from the appointment and promotion procedures, and from
family links among civil servants that it must have been high. pp.203–4, 208,
216, Dominic C.B. Lieven, ‘Russian Senior Officialdom under Nicholas II’,
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 32, 1984.
7 pp.281–3, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.
8 p.9, Sir Donald MacKenzie Wallace, Russia, Cassell, London, 1913, first pub-
lished, 1877. They fit Schumpeter’s definition of a class to a tee. See fn 1,
p.349, supra.
9 p.411, Marc Raeff, ‘The Bureaucratic Phenomena of Imperial Russia’, American
Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, 1979.
10 p.286, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.
11 pp.65–8, Pipes, 1992, op. cit.; p.209, Lieven, op. cit.
12 p.287, ibid. Lieven referred to ‘a great division’ between provincial civil ser-
vants and those in Petersburg. p.210, Lieven, op. cit. For statistical documenta-
tion of the differences in their ranks, salaries, and education see pp.227–8,
242–7, Walter M. Pintner, ‘Civil Officialdom and the Nobility in the 1850s’,
pp.227–49, in Walter M. Pintner and Don K. Rowney, eds, Russian Officialdom:
The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth
Century, Macmillan, London, 1980. 49% of his sample of provincial officials
had only elementary education. p.247, ibid.
13 pp.231–6, 243–5, ibid.
14 pp.114, 134, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.
15 pp.241–2, Pintner, op. cit.
16 pp.112–13, Wallace, op. cit. A telling measure of their contrast with the English
is the proportions of land they each owned. In England in 1874, the landed
elite owned ‘at least 55%’ of all land while all state and para-state bodies,
including the Church, together owned a mere 3%. In 1887 the landed elite
owned about 14% of all land in Russia while peasants owned 33% and the
state 47%. pp.3, 6, David Spring, ‘Landed Elites Compared’, pp.1–24, in David
Spring, ed., European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century, Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore, 1977.
17 pp.345–6, Blum, op. cit.
18 pp.173–4, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.
19 Peter and several of his successors sought, unsuccessfully, to stop this custom.
pp.377–9, Blum, op. cit.
20 pp.375–85, ibid.
21 pp.347–50, ibid.
22 Moon discusses the evidence, which shows considerable regional variations,
but he is in no doubt that a very large majority of villages did not have a resi-
dent landowner. p.205, David Moon, The Russian Peasantry: The World the
Peasants Made, Longman, London, 1999.
23 pp.352–3, Blum, p.211, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.
25 Pipes noted the despair of Speranskii, one of Alexander I’s advisers who
wanted the Russian dvoriane to become something like the English nobility. In
1818, he complained that the ‘nobles run away from elections to the
Assemblies, and soon it will be necessary to convoke them using gendarmes
in order to compel the nobles to take advantage of their rights.’ p.183, Pipes,
1977, op. cit.
26 pp.45, 83–95, Roberta T. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry
and Government, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1982.
27 pp.112, 119, Raeff, op. cit.
28 pp.160–72, Wallace, op. cit.
29 p.165, ibid.
30 p.176, Theodore Taranovski, ‘Nobility in the Russian Empire: some problems
of definition and interpretation’, pp.314–18, Slavic Review, Vol. 47, No. 2,
Summer, 1988.
31 p.115, ibid. Becker similarly suggested that as a collectivity, the nobility were
no more than ‘a legal fiction’ and ‘no longer a social reality’. p.171, Seymour
Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia, Northern Illinois University
Press, Dekalb, 1985.
32 Becker estimated that the United Nobility represented the 12% or so of the
nobility whose families owned substantial quantities of land. He described
them as a new land-owning class emerging from within the old noble estate.
p.162ff ibid.; for a breakdown of members of the State Council, p.351,
Manning, op. cit.
33 p.255, Daniel T. Orlovsky, ‘High Officials in the Ministry of Internal Affairs,
1855–1881’, pp.250–82, Pintner and Rowney, eds, op. cit.
34 It has remained a problem for later researchers. p.238, Pintner, p.260,
Orlovsky, op. cit.
35 pp.251–2, ibid.; pp.303–15, Don K. Rowney, ‘Organizational Change and
Social Adaptation: the pre-revolutionary Ministry of Internal Affairs,
pp.283–315, in Pintner and Rowney, op. cit. For other evidence on the decline
in the proportion of noble landowners in senior ranks in the second half of
the nineteenth century pp.25–9, Manning, op. cit.
36 Even before Alexander II’s reforms, some 21% even at the highest levels, in
the councils of the tsar were commoners, and they were found ‘in much
larger numbers in important positions in the ministries where there was
much de facto power.’ p.239, Pintner, op. cit. A commitment to meritocratic
principles therefore co-existed with patronage and favouritism, as Lieven
showed pp.220–3, op. cit.
37 pp.210–14, Walter M. Pintner, ‘The Evolution of Civil Officialdom
1755–1855’, pp.190–226 in Pintner and Rowney, eds, op. cit. In the past,
former officers had looked down on office work, as if it were semi-retirement
after the rigours of military service.
38 p.272, ibid. For the mid-century mobility between the capital and provinces
see pp.227, 247–8, Pintner, op. cit. The differences were still stark but the
provincial officials were at least, as Pintner put it, ‘being disciplined to the
principles of bureaucratic form and function.’ p.227, ibid.
39 p.38, Manning, op. cit.
40 pp.194–6, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.
41 pp.208–11, ibid.
42 p.212, ibid.
43 pp.212–15, ibid. Merchants complained about serf traders, but the latter
enjoyed protection under their masters. By the early nineteenth century there
was no substantive difference in rights of peasants and merchants who
wished to engage in manufacturing or trade. pp.282–98, Blum, op. cit.
44 pp.415–27, Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia,
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1982; pp.215–17, Pipes, 1977,
op. cit.
45 p.21, Rieber, op. cit.

46 pp.418–21, ibid.
47 p.424, Rieber, op. cit. The failure of Peter’s and Catherine’s attempts to
create artisan guilds meant that much of Russia’s proto-industrialization
was by handicraft or kustar production by enserfed peasants. pp.301–3, Blum,
op. cit.
48 pp.xxv, 134–9, Rieber, op. cit.; Henry Rosovsky, ‘The Serf Entrepreneur in
Russia’, pp.207–33, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, Vol. VI, 1954.
49 pp.3, 22–3, Rieber, op. cit.
50 pp.272–3, ibid.
51 pp.272–7, Robert B. McKean, St Petersburg Between the Revolutions: Workers and
Revolutionaries, June 1907–February 1917, Yale University Press, New Haven,
1990. Roosa’s work on the only national business association, the Association
of Industry and Trade, led to a similar conclusion. Ruth AmEnde Roosa,
Russian Industrialists in an Era of Revolution: The Association of Industry and
Trade, 1906–1917, edited by Thomas C. Owen, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, N.Y.,
1997.
52 pp.415, 423–4, Rieber, op. cit. Since the regime never passed any general law
of incorporation, all corporations were created by special laws or decrees.
Entrepreneurs therefore necessarily had to maintain personal relationships
with state officials. Thomas C. Owen, The Corporation under Russian Law
1800–1917: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1991.
54 for authoritative reviews of the debates about its origins see pp.508–10, ibid.;
pp.213–14, Moon, op. cit.
55 and it varied considerably by time and place pp.524–5, Blum, pp.202–6,
227–36, Moon, op. cit.
56 According to the 1858 census, just before emancipation, there were 51.5 million
serfs, a majority of whom, 52%, were state serfs, while 42% were personally
owned by noble landlords, and the remainder belonged to the court and the
church. p.99, Moon, op. cit.
57 pp.199, 231–5, ibid.
58 pp.289–92, 299–301, 471–3, Blum, op. cit.
59 To compensate for the reduction in the supervisory powers of their masters,
the police powers of the communes, renamed ‘village societies’, were increased
in certain respects. pp.598–9, Blum, pp.228–9, Moon, op. cit.
60 Their resistance is analysed in Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917:
Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation, Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1999.
61 After failing to find any binding precedents or principles in the decisions of
the volost court on his own or any other estate, one contemporary lawyer con-
cluded that ‘Our one hundred million peasants lived, in their everyday life,
without law.’ pp.115–16, Pipes, 1992, op. cit.
62 p.97, ibid.
63 After emancipation contiguous communes were linked together to form
‘townships’ or volosti. p.599, Blum, op. cit.
64 Alan Kimball, ‘The Village Kabak as an Expression of Russian Civil Society,
1855–1905’, www.uoregon.edu 2002. His study was based on some of the
2,000 replies in the archive of amateur mass observation of rural life insti-
gated by Prince Tenishev in the late 1880s.
65 Kimball pointed out that priests, merchants, money-lenders and professionals,

as well as officials, tax-collectors and policemen, were as likely as peasants to
make use of the kabak. ibid.
66 pp.551–7, Blum, op. cit.; pp.237–81, Moon, op. cit.
67 ‘Russian peasants were only one group among several involved in the revolts,
and usually a minority.’ p.242, ibid.
68 p.352, ibid.
69 pp.147–9, Pipes, 1992, op. cit.
70 pp.149–50, Manning, op. cit.
71 pp.164–5, 207–12, 239–43, ibid. This level of peasant representation was anti-
cipated in the mistaken belief that a duma dominated by rural representatives
would be more tractable. pp.157–8, Pipes, 1992, op. cit.
72 for an outline of these events pp.533–7, ibid.
73 p.346, Blum, op. cit.
74 pp.122–40, Raeff, 1966, op. cit.
75 pp.140–7, ibid.
76 Pipes pointed out that the word is ‘a clumsy Latinized adaptation of the
French Intelligence and German intelligenz which in the first half of the nine-
teenth century came to be used to … designate the educated, enlightened,
“progressive” elements in society.’ He gave examples of the use of die intel-
ligenz in Austria and Germany in 1849, and then added that the ‘word
entered the Russian vocabulary in the 1860s and by the 1870s became a
household term around which revolved a great deal of political discussion.’
pp.251–3, Pipes, 1977, op. cit. For an overview of their emergence George
Fischer, ‘The Intelligentsia and Russia’, pp.252–74, in Cyril Black, ed., The
Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Change Since 1861, Harvard
77 pp.262–5, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.
78 pp.138–41, Pipes, 1992, op. cit.
79 pp.4–8, ibid.
80 for a detailed account of both, see Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in
Russia, 1900–1905, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973.
81 The most striking example was the refusal of Mensheviks and others to
support workers who had organized to resist the Bolsheviks when they began
to construct a police state, on the grounds that this would risk a restoration of
autocracy. pp.561–2, Pipes, 1992, op. cit.
82 pp.5-6, Martin Malia, ‘What is the Intelligentsia?’ pp.1–18 in Richard Pipes,
ed., The Russian Intelligentsia, Columbia University Press, New York, 1961.
Other observers have conveyed this idea in slightly different terms. Labedz,
for instance, thought that ‘it was the attitude towards the existing order that
was the decisive factor’ in its formation, plus ‘its education, its way of life,
and a general sense of affinity with the Western cultural community.’ pp.48,
65 Leopold Labedz, ‘The Structure of the Soviet Intelligentsia’, pp.63–79,
ibid.
83 p.16, Malia, 1961, op. cit.
84 Magnificently documented in Samuel Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials
Under the Last Three Tsars, Praeger, New York, 1953.
85 pp.235–6, 245–8, Galai, op. cit. A substantial proportion of the 600 or so
societies Bradley identified in Moscow prior to the Revolution were related to
emergent professions. Joseph Bradley,’ Voluntary Civic Culture and Obshchest-
vennost in Moscow’, pp.131–48, in Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow and
James L. West, eds, Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for
Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, Princeton University Press, Princeton,
N.J., 1991.
86 pp.22–6, 48–9, Nancy Mandelker Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform
and Revolution, 1856–1905, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1981.
87 pp.28–51, 155–62, Robert Eugene Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The
Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century, Rutgers University
Press, New Brunswick, 1979.
88 S.P. Turin, From Peter The Great To Lenin: A History of the Russian Labour
Movement With Special Reference to Trade Unionism, Frank Cass, London, 1968.
89 p.494, Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime 1919–1924, Fontana,
London, 1995.
90 pp.107–9, Pipes, 1992, op. cit. Lenin should probably be counted among the
sceptics, since at the Eleventh Party Congress in 1922 he denied that Russia
had ever had a ‘proletariat’ in Marx’s sense, and suggested most factory
workers at the time were what we could call ‘draft dodgers’. pp.452–3, 704,
ibid.; pp.6–15, Richard Pipes, Three Whys of the Russian Revolution, Vintage,
New York, 1997.
91 pp.5–7, Pipes, 1992, op. cit.
92 pp.24, 41–2, ibid.
93 pp.31, 64, Reginald E. Zelnik, ‘On the Eve: Life Histories and Identities of
Some Revolutionary Workers’, 1870–1905’, pp.27–66, in Lewis H. Siegelbaum
and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds, Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity,
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1994.
94 Heather Hogan, ‘Class Formation in the St Petersburg Metalworking Industry:
From the “Days of Freedom” to the Lena Goldfields Massacre’, pp.85–112, in
Siegelbaum and Suny, eds, op. cit.
95 pp.172–8, 489, McKean, op. cit.
96 pp.401–3, ibid.
97 pp.233, 268, 411, 424, ibid.
98 pp.225–6, 405, ibid.
99 pp.188–9, 225–6, 405, ibid.
100 pp.192–4, 406–29, ibid.
101 pp.225, 227, 232, 263, 414, ibid.
102 pp.401–2, 409–11, ibid.
103 pp.148–53, Rule, op. cit.
104 At one point he referred to it as in a transition stage of a hereditary prole-
tariat, which reversed during the war as the employment of peasants, refugees
and women increased. p.480, McKean, op. cit. My italics.
105 Perlman strongly, and persuasively, argued that the intelligentsia only acquired
credibility and adherents because the imperial regime crushed organized
labour. pp.36–49, Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement, Macmillan,
New York, 1928.
106 p.157, Dimitry Pospielovsky, Russian Police Trade Unionism: Experiment or
Provocation?, Weidenfield & Nicolson, London, 1971; pp.163–72, McKean, op. cit.
107 p.156, Pospielovsky, op. cit. He quoted a number of Social Democrats to
support this conclusion.
108 pp.22–5, Pipes, 1992, op. cit.
109 pp.406–9, 491–2, McKean, op. cit. See also p.36, R.B. McKean, ‘Between the
Revolutions: Russia 1905–1917’, New Appreciations, 40, Historical Association,
London, 1998.
110 For a contrary view of February 1917 see James D. White, ‘The Russian
Revolution of February 1917: The Question of Organisation and Spontaneity’,
New Perspective 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1997.
111 We have Lenin’s word for it. pp.447–8, Pipes, 1995, op. cit.
112 Pipes gives the proportions of ex-tsarist officials in Sovnarkom and five
commissariats. The lowest was 48.3% in that of the Interior. Ibid.; p.62,
T.H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1979.
113 After the Bolsheviks used force to disperse the Constituent Assembly, workers
spontaneously organized to express their opposition. So-called ‘plenipotentiaries’
of Petrograd factories held regular meetings, formed a Council, organized
strikes, and demanded the freedom of assembly and of the press, as well as
the reconvening of the Assembly. There were a variety of other workers’ ‘coun-
cils’, ‘conferences’ and ‘assemblies’ and similar movements in other towns.
pp.558–65, Pipes, 1995. The most vivid testimony is to be found in ‘Extra-
ordinary Meeting of Delegates of the Factories and Workshops of Petrograd’,
No. 1–2, 18th March 1918, in Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, ed., Material from
Documents of the Time, trans by Shirley-Anne Hardy, mimeo.
114 Jonathan Grant, ‘The Social Construction of Philately in the Early Soviet Era’,
pp.476–93, Comparative Studies in Society & History, Vol. 37, No. 3, July 1995;
pp.107–11, Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia:
A Study of Practices, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999. The fate of
the kabak or village pub, ‘the secular soul of rural life’ in Kimball’s phrase,
would also be interesting in this context, but I have been unable to find any
study of it under the Soviet regime.
115 Pipes thought that there was ‘a direct line of succession’ between the dvo-
rianstvo, the service nobility, and communist apparatchiks. p.97, Pipes, [1992]
1977, op. cit.
116 pp.206, 293, Malia, 1994, op. cit.
117 pp.440–8, 461–2, Pipes, 1995, op. cit.
118 see Voslensky, op. cit. Another insider, a former procurator, has provided
much information about the segregation and the privileges of the nomen-
klatura. Olimpiad S. Joffe, Soviet Law and Reality, Martinus Nijhoff,
Amsterdam, 1985. Its leading members, in the late 1980s, are listed in Albert
Loren Weeks, The Soviet Nomenklatura: A Comprehensive Roster of Soviet Civilian
and Military Officials, Washington Institute Press, Washington, D.C., 1987.
119 For details see pp.159–63, Mervyn Matthews, Privilege in the Soviet Union:
A Study of Elite Life-Styles under Communism, Allen & Unwin, London, 1978.
120 pp.213, 221, Voslensky, op. cit.
121 pp.337–8, Malia, 1994, op. cit.
122 The other being his proposed cuts in military expenditure. pp.25–8, Andrei
Sakharov, My Country and the World, Vintage, New York, 1975.
123 pp.3–4, 61–3, 174, Donald R. Kelley, The Politics of Developed Socialism: The
Soviet Union as a Post-Industrial State, Greenwood, Westport, 1986.
124 p.3, Introduction, T.H. Rigby and Bohdan Harasymiw, eds, Leadership Selection
and Patron-Client Relations in the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia, Allen & Unwin,
London, 1983.
125 p.722, Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, ‘From Soviet Nomenklatura
to Soviet Élite’, pp.711–33, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 48, No. 5, July 1996.
There are numerous websites documenting the activities of contemporary
chinovniki.
126 Filtzer notes that after Yeltsin’s triumph in 1991 directors began to organize as a
class via the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, though he was
less than impressed by its effectiveness. pp.82–93, 220, Donald Filtzer, Soviet
Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika: The Soviet Labour Process and Gorbachev’s
Reforms, 1985–1991, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.
127 Joseph R. Blasi, Maya Kroumova and Douglas Kruse, Kremlin Capitalism:
Privatizing the Russian Economy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1997.
128 Lazar Volin, A Century of Russian Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970.
129 pp.41–60, M. Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectiv-
isation, Norton, New York, 1968.
130 p.428, Alex Inkeles, ‘Rethinking Social Welfare: the United States and the
U.S.S.R. in Comparative Perspective’, pp.383–457, in Gail W. Lapidus and Guy
E. Swanson, eds, State and Welfare USA/U.S.S.R., Institute of International
Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1988.
131 p.119, Christopher M. Davis, ‘The Organization and Performance of the
Soviet Health Service’, pp.95–142, in Lapidus and Swanson, op. cit.
132 p.124, Tim McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 1996.
133 pp.285–6, Pipes, 1995, op. cit. The best general survey, by a mile is pp.282–336,
ibid.
134 For an analysis of three institutions which played a major part in this Michael
David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning Among the Bolsheviks,
1918–1929, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1997.
135 The deadening conformity of intellectual life has been described in dozens of
studies. Lyons, an American communist émigré to the Soviet Union in the
1930s, entitled his account ‘Culture in a Straitjacket’. See Eugene Lyons,
pp.465–73, Assignment in Utopia, Harrap, London, ca 1938. He also gave an
account of the treatment of one inadvertent dissident of the day. pp.246–9,
ibid.
136 p.66, Labedz, op. cit.
137 Lampert’s study shows that even the technical specialists whom, one imag-
ines, were the most naturally cohesive set of occupations within the entire
intelligentsia, had little opportunity to develop any kind of collective con-
sciousness or corporate institutions, even after they found some favour with
the regime. Nicholas Lampert, The Technical Intelligentsia and the Soviet State:
A Study of Managers and Technicians 1928–1935, Macmillan, London, 1979.
138 Hayward thought Ilya Ehrenburg was, at the time, its most powerful and
influential spokesman. pp.117–19, Max Hayward, ‘The Thaw and the Writers’,
pp.111–21, in Pipes, 1961, op. cit. Pipes pointed out that ‘the Soviet Monthly
Novy Mir sought, with a fair measure of success, to revive the fat journal’s
political role as a critic of the status quo’. p.265, Pipes, The best general survey
is Pipes, 1997, op. cit.
139 p.139, Marshall S. Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective, Cambridge
140 p.54, Richard Pipes, ‘The Historical Evolution of the Russian Intelligentsia’,
pp.47–62, in Pipes, 1961, op. cit.
141 p.129, David Lane, Soviet Society Under Perestroika, Unwin Hyman, Boston,
1988.
142 Jay B. Sorenson, The Life and Death of Soviet Trade Unionism, 1917–1928,
Atherton Press, New York, 1969.
143 Bolshevik leaders often argued that the true workers had given their lives in
the Civil War and that they were now left with ‘scum’, ‘malingerers and all
kinds of casual elements.’ pp.452–3, Pipes, 1995, op. cit.
144 Leon Trotsky, ‘The Role and Tasks of Trade Unions’, in Leon Trotsky on the
Trade Unions, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1975.
145 For a helpful documented commentary by Maurice Brinton on the disputes
about the role of trade unions see libcom.org/library/Bolsheviks
146 pp.376–7, V.I. Lenin, On Trade Unions, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970. For
an overview of the kind of unions that thereafter emerged see Joseph Godson,
‘The Role of Trade Unions’, pp.106–29, in Joseph Godson and Leonard
Schapiro, eds, The Soviet Worker: From Lenin to Andropov, St. Martins, New
York, 1984.
147 For an early euphoric account see pp.734–55, Sidney and Beatrice Webb,
Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, Vol. 2, Longmans Green, London,
1935.
148 For his own ghosted account see Aleksei Grigor’evich Stakhanov, The
Stakhanov Movement Explained, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow,
1939.
149 Kotkin had described such initiatives in steel plants in Magnitogorsk in the
1930s. He suggested that many workers enthusiastically embraced the new
self-identity that they offered. pp.278–97, Stephen Kotkin, ‘Coercion and
Identity: Workers’ Lives in Stalin’s Showcase City’, pp.274–310, in Siegelbaum
and Suny, op. cit.
150 Siegelbaum, who conducted the most thorough investigation to date, was in
no doubt that they were state-managed, that they intensified antagonisms
within an already fractionalized workforce, fed upon the individualistic con-
sciousness among workers and intensified competition among workers.
pp.298–99, Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in
the U.S.S.R., 1935–41, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988. Some
sources, such as www.cyberussr.com, suggest that the Soviets themselves
acknowledged it was state-managed, but I have been unable to locate an
authoritative reference. On the bogus nature of vstrechny plans in the 70s see
p.277, Hedrick Smith, The Russians, Sphere, London, 1976.
151 pp.135–6, Lane, op. cit.
152 Willis thought that ‘to be a worker or peasant carries little status’ and dis-
tinguished between ‘a public show, in which the worker and peasant are all
important, and a private, more real one, in which they are not.’ p.67, David
K. Willis, Klass: How Russians Really Live, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1985.
153 for some details David Rousset, ed., Coercion of the Worker in the Soviet Union,
Beacon Press, Boston, 1953; Thomas B. Smith, The Other Establishment: An In-
Depth Study of What Individual Life is Really Like in Communist-Controlled
Countries, Regnery Gateway, Chicago, 1984.
154 Kevin Murphy, ‘Opposition at Local Level: A Case Study of the Hammer &
Sickle Factory’, Europe-Asia, Vol. 53, No. 2, 2001.
155 Kenneth M. Straus, Factory and Community in Stalin’s Russia: The Making of an
Industrial Working Class, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1997.
An American worker’s observations of unions at the time suggest they would
have been wholly incapable of performing any role on behalf of the working
class. pp.29, 34–6, 84, John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in
Russia’s City of Steel, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1942, (1973
reprint).
156 Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the
Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–1964, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1992; pp.82–93, Filtzer, 1994, op. cit. For a survey of
attempts to organize strikes and form independent unions see Nancy Gidwitz,
‘Labor Unrest in the Soviet Union’, pp.25–42, Problems of Communism,
Nov.–Dec., 1982.
157 These regimes, of course, were accepted by the world as real regimes, so why
should the working class not be accepted as a real working class? The answer
is that the criterion for recognition of states is merely that they exercise
powers usually exercised by states. The criterion for recognition of classes is
that members feel they belong to it, and give evidence of shared interests and
concerns.
158 pp.130–3, S.A. Smith, Workers Against Foremen in St. Petersburg 1905–1917,
pp.113–37, in Siegelbaum and Suny, eds, op. cit.
159 Sarah Ashwin, Russian Workers: The Anatomy of Patience, Manchester Univer-
sity Press, Manchester, 1999.
160 In Filtzer’s account, they were less supine and patient, but he nonetheless
argued that the proletariat was still in the process of its historical re-formation,
which would hardly be necessary if the working class had existed in the Soviet
Union. Filtzer, 1994, op. cit.
161 Blasi et al., op. cit.
162 pp.36–7, Pospielovsky, pp.312–14, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.
163 1st December 1971, quoted p.107, Godson, op. cit.
164 Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the
Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941, Princeton University, Princeton,
1978; more briefly pp.12–22, Lampert, op. cit.; p.70, D.D. Barry, ‘More Equal
than Others: the legal basis for awarding Honors in the U.S.S.R.’, in Law
After Revolution, William E. Butler, Peter B. Maggs and John B. Quigley,
eds, Oceana, New York, 1988. This was yet another continuity with the
Table of Ranks. Graduates had then been placed in rank twelve, those with
masters in rank ten, and those with doctorates in rank eight, irrespective
of whether they entered state service or not. p.394, Henn-Jüri Uibopuu, ‘The
administration of universities in Russia and its impact today’, pp.375–95, in
D.D. Barry et al., eds, Law and the Gorbachev Era, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht,
1988.
165 It was reproduced in the Collection of Laws of 1892, which identified four
sosloviia: the nobility, the clergy, the urban and rural populations. pp.16–17,
Gregory L. Freeze, ‘The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History’,
pp.11–36, American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1, Feb. 1986.
166 p.36ff, Frieden, op. cit.
167 p.22, ibid. Rieber agreed. ‘However indistinct the modified soslovie system
appeared, it exercised a powerful influence on social life in Russia up to the
revolution of March 1917, especially among the merchantry, nobility, and
the peasantry … many traditional social distinctions rooted in the soslovia
lived on in the daily activities and outlook of a very large part of the popu-
lation.’ p.xxiv, Rieber, op. cit.
168 pp.130, 136, 171, Elise Kimerling Wirstschafter, Social Identity in Imperial
Russia, Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, 1997.
169 Blum drew a similar contrast between pre-Petrine and Petrine Russia. The
sovereigns of Russia had long maintained that all of their subjects, nobles,
townsmen and peasants alike existed to serve the state. To achieve their goal
of universal service they assigned each class in society a specific role, charged
it with specific obligations, and demanded that each of their subjects be a
member of one of these classes. However, they were hampered by an inefficient
governmental organization. Some of their subjects remained outside the
recognized social categories, in the interstices of the social order, and
sheltered by the anonymity of their classlessness they lived as free men.
By contrast, he thought Peter had ‘devised machinery to register each of
his subjects as a member of an established social category.’ pp.414–15, Blum,
op. cit.
170 This was one reason they did so well in the elections for the First State Duma.
Peasants had substantial proportion of votes in the landowners’ curia. p.210,
Manning, op. cit.
171 p.144, Lampert, op. cit.
172 pp.232–3, David R. Shearer, Industry, State, and Society in Stalin’s Russia,
1926–1934, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1996.
173 Garnsey concurred. ‘In the Soviet Union labour allocation and payment struc-
tures are determined in part by market forces’ and ‘market situation is rele-
vant to the benefits enjoyed by members of various occupational groups.’
p.631, Elizabeth Garnsey, ‘Growth Strategy, Competing Interests, and the Soviet
Occupational System’, pp.629–41, in Anthony Giddens and David Held, eds,
Classes, Power & Conflict, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1982.
174 p.125, Karl-Eugen Wädekin, The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture, University
of California Press, Berkeley, 1973. For their later history Stefan Hedlun,
Private Agriculture in the Soviet Union, Routledge, London, 1989.
175 For an account of the activities of tolkachi see pp.207–30, Joseph S. Berliner,
Factory and Manager in the U.S.S.R., Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 1957.
176 p.101, Willis, op. cit. Grossman, however, pointed out that about one-half of
the total Soviet population, and one-quarter of the urban population resided
in privately-owned property, and suggested that the black economy was not
confined to lesser service occupations but involved ‘a vast and varied set of
activities.’ p.25, Gregory Grossman, ‘The “Second Economy” of the U.S.S.R.’,
pp.25–40, Problems of Communism, Sept.–Oct. 1977. Katz estimated that in
1959 some 10% of the Soviet labour force were self-employed. p.76, Zev Katz,
Soviet Dissenters and Social Structure in the U.S.S.R., Center for International
Studies, Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
177 Arkady Vaksberg, The Soviet Mafia, trans by John and Elizabeth Roberts,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1991.
178 Willis makes the same point that money was less important than privilege,
status and access: these are the really valuable commodities, the hidden cur-
rency of the Top Class, and the Rising Class of Soviet society. pp.92–3, Willis,
op. cit.
179 Over the years 1991–1994 between 18% and 43% of various political-
administrative elites came from outside the nomenklatura, but 59% of a
100-member sample of the business elite. p.728, Kryshtanovskaya and White,
op. cit. In their study of Novosibirisk, Hughes and John drew a similar con-
trast between ‘the successful elite adaptation strategies of former party
apparatchiki who dominate local administrative power’ and a ‘new, younger
more innovatory’ economic elite. James Hughes and Peter John, ‘Local elites
and transition in Russia: adaptation or competition?’, pp.673–85, British
Journal of Political Science, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2001.
Chapter 5 Civil Society as Adversary and Collaborator in

France
1 ‘a rather self-serving passion’ in Noiriel’s view since observers usually referred
to it to support their own social projects. pp.21–3, 67, Gérard Noiriel, Workers
in French Society in the 19th & 20th Centuries, trans by Helen McPhail, Berg,
Oxford, 1990; p.55, Christophe Charle, Histoire sociale de la France au XIXe
siècle, Éditions de Seuil, Paris, 1991.
2 p.170, Noiriel, op. cit.
3 pp.589, 601, Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, Norton, New York,
1978.
4 pp.56–77, Mark Traugott, Armies of the Poor: Determinants of Working Class
Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848, Transaction, 2001. The
‘revolutionary proletariat’ was also on average some ten years older than the
‘bourgeois’ forces, and therefore more of them were married with children.
5 p.186, ibid.
6 p.215, Pipes, 1977, op. cit.
7 p.69, Christopher Johnson, ‘Patterns of Proletarianization: Parisian Tailors
and Lodève Woolens Workers’, pp.65–82 in John M. Merriman, ed.,
Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth Century Europe, Holmes &
Meier, New York, 1979.
8 pp.70–1, 81, ibid.
9 Ronald Aminzade, ‘The Transformation of Social Solidarities in Nineteenth
Century Toulouse’, pp.85–106 in Merriman, op. cit.
10 p.87, ibid. His argument at this point is not helped by the fact that all seven
of the strikes he discussed were conducted by single-trade mutual benefit soci-
eties. However, there were 89 other mutual benefit societies in the city and
they may well have behaved in the manner he suggested.
11 pp.89, 91, ibid. It did not, however, itself immediately live up to this goal,
since it organized by trade, and during its first public demonstration they
assembled and marched under their trade banners. ibid.
12 pp.94, 96–7, ibid.
13 p.102, ibid. The changes he documented were a ‘growing capital concentra-
tion’, an ‘increased division of labour’, ‘a decline in worker’s collective control
over the production process and labor market’, and the ‘growth of putting
out, or “sweated” production.’ pp.98–102 ibid.
14 p.103, ibid.
15 p.77, W.H. Sewell, ‘Social Change and the Rise of Working Class Politics in
Nineteenth Century Marseille’, pp.75–109, Past & Present, No. 56, November
1974.
16 p.78, ibid.
17 p.102, ibid.
18 p.73, Johnson, op. cit.
19 pp.87–9, Aminzade, op. cit.
20 p.100, Sewell, op. cit.
21 p.65, Ronald Aminzade, Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican
Politics in France 1830–1871, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993.
22 p.273, Robert Tombs, France 1814–1914, Longman, London, 1996.
23 pp.22–4, 54, Alexis de Tocqueville, The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville,
trans by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, edited by J.P. Mayer, Meridian Books,
New York, 1959.
24 cited p.78, A.J.P. Taylor, Revolutions and Revolutionaries, Hamish Hamilton,

London, 1980.
25 pp.20–6 Tombs, op. cit. The six acts of it were: fomenting revolution, mass dis-
order in Paris, government response, popular offensive, choosing a revolu-
tionary government by acclamation, occupying ministries. The metaphor was
proposed p.211, Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest,
1789–1820, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970.
26 pp.46, 121ff Marx, ed. Fernbach, op. cit. Marx’s italics.
27 Limitations on the right to vote, to be nominated for political office, to serve
on juries or in the National Guard, and the limitations on the freedoms of
speech, assembly and association are summarized pp.186–7, Andre Jardin and
Andre-Jean Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction 1815–1848, trans by Elborg
Forster, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983.
28 pp.274–8, Tombs, op. cit.
29 P.H. Amann, Clubs in Encyclopaedia of Revolutions, www.ohiou. edu
pp.324–37, P.H. Amann, Revolution and Mass Democracy: The Paris Club Movement
in 1848, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975.
30 pp.156–9, Roger Magraw, A History of the French Working Class, Vol. 1: The Age
of Artisan Revolution 1815–1871, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992.
31 pp.292, Tombs, op. cit.; pp.151–2, D.L. Hanley, A.P. Kerr and N.H. Waites,
Contemporary France: Politics and Society Since 1945, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
London, 1984.
32 W.H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labour from the
Old Regime to 1848, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980.
33 p.95, Sewell; p.72, Johnson, op. cit.
34 Violent disputes between various federations of compagnonnages still occurred
in the early nineteenth century. pp.219–20, 230–1, Cynthia Maria Truant, The
Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France,
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1994; p.86, Aminzade, 1979, op. cit.
35 It had already been proclaimed in articles 3 and 6 of the Declaration of the
Rights of Man in August 1789, and the decret d’Allarde in March 1791, and
was reiterated in the Constitution of 1791, the Constitution of Year 1 (1793)
and in the Constitution of Year III (1795) for which see pp.34, 82, 102,
Jacques Godechot, ed., Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789, Garnier
Flammarion, Paris, 1979.
36 p.4 David Rappe, Histoire des Bourses du travail http://increvablesanarchistes.org
Rappe himself describes them as ‘un instrument total de lutte de l’organisation à
la révolution en passant par l’education ouvrière’, as ‘foyers d’agitation constante’,
as ‘un centre de résistance, de revendications et d’actions ouvrières’ and as ‘un
ferment de désagrégation révolutionnaire de la société établie, de l’ordre social en
place.’ pp.4–7 ibid. The entire paragraph is indebted to this spirited blog.
37 For an illuminating account of their mentalités through the turn of the
century see F.F. Ridley, Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of
its Time, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970.
38 it is reprinted on www.fondation-besnard.org
39 Only two described themselves as workers; an ouvrièr agricole and an ouvrièr
mécanicien. Two described themselves as employé. The remainder only named
their industry such as bâtiment, textile, or voiture, mineur, or metallurgie. ibid.
40 Their officers, activities and membership are documented in Les Associations
professionelles ouvrières, Direction du Travail, 4 vols, Paris 1899–1904; for their
contribution to strikes pp.90–1, 146–8, Noiriel, op. cit.
41 ‘appears’ is the critical word. Most standard accounts find it difficult to docu-
ment, but Friedman estimated that it climbed from 5% of industrial wage
earners in 1889 to 23% in 1914, but after the peaks mentioned it appears to
have sunk to a very low level. p.41 Gerald Friedman, State-Making and Labor
Movements: France and the United States, 1876–1914, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, NY, 1998. pp.148–9 Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France,
1830–1968, Cambridge University Press, London, 1974. They described post-
war membership figures ‘a disaster area’. ibid. Most observers agree member-
ship was volatile, and that the numbers claimed were invariably unreliable.
42 Ministry of Labour survey ‘Mythes et réalités de la syndicalisation en France’,
Thomas Amossé, Premières informations, premières syntheses, DARES, October
2004, n°44–2.
43 First, in 1919 about the Russian Revolution, which led to the formation of
Confédération Général du Travail Unitaires, second in 1939 about the Soviet
invasion of Poland, and third, in 1947 about the Marshall Plan, which led to
the formation of the Confédération Général du Travail-Force Ouvrière (CGT-FO),
ibid.
44 For a succinct account pp.26–38, Hubert Landier, Les Organizations Syndicales
en France, Collection Cadreco, Paris, 1982. After looking at these and numer-
ous other disagreements Shorter & Tilly exclaimed ‘how dreary is this tale of
rupture and division.’ p.171, op. cit.
45 For an example of a corporatist breakaway see the Union Corporative des
Charpentiers-Toiliers, formed in 1921 which survived ‘until the 1930s’
pp.624–30, Edward H. Lorenz, ‘Two Patterns of Development: The Labour
Process in the British and French Shipbuilding Industries 1880–1930’,
pp.599–630, Journal of Economic History, 1984.
46 p.170, Shorter and Tilly, op. cit.
47 pp.295–6, Tombs; pp.131–6, Friedman, op. cit.
48 For one example see John Stirling and Jeff Bridgford, ‘British and French
Shipbuilding: the industrial relations of decline’, pp.7–16, Industrial Relations
Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4, 1985.
49 The Luxembourg Commission was an assembly of representatives of all the
organized trades convened by the Provisional Government in the Palais de
Luxembourg to discuss their grievances.
50 After 1906, governments wondered whether the bourses were aiding the inte-
gration of workers with the regime or alienating them from it. They then
began to cut their financial support, to close branches, sometimes reopening
them with less militant staff. As an independent institution, the bourses had
disappeared before the outbreak of war, though the CGT continued to occupy
their premises and receive grants for some of their educational activities.
Rappe, op. cit.
51 The laws are summarized pp.210–11, W. Rand Smith, Crisis in the French
Labour Movement: A Grassroots Perspective, Macmillan, London, 1987. They
were by no means all new. Several attempts had previously been made to
define legally the rights of unions and employees in the workplace.
52 pp.154–5, 216–18, ibid.
53 Jean-François Amadieu, ‘Labour-Management Co-operation and Work
Organization Change: Deficits in the French Industrial Relations System’,
pp.61–92, New Directions in Work Organisation, OECD, Paris, 1992. Amadieu
mentioned a number of other factors to explain the absence of collective bar-
gaining. ‘Three quarters of the labour force’, he observed ‘still worked in firms
of fewer than 50 employees and these are very reluctant to cede any of its
right to manage.’ The ‘steep hierarchies, and highly formalized procedures’
typical of French management, and the ‘vast array of legally-required substan-
tive rules’ were, he thought, contributory factors. p.72, ibid.
54 In France, 9% of the labour force in 1997 belonged to unions, while 90% were
covered by union agreements. By comparison, in Britain the respective pro-
portions were 33% and 26%, in the United States 14% and 11%, and in Japan
24% and 25%. pp.237–8, 248, World Labour Report, 1997–8. ILO, Geneva,
1997.
55 European Industrial Relations Observatory On-line, www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int/
2002/10/feature/TN0212101F.html
56 Section 2.1, Para 1.18, Catherine Vincent and Elif Aksaz, EMIRE (European
Employment and Industrial Relations Glossary) ibid., and www.eiro.euro-
found.eu.int/2005/03.
57 Christian Dufour, Questionnaire for EIRO comparative study on changes in the
national collective bargaining systems since 1990 – the case of France, ibid.
58 Apart from the ‘bourgeoisie as a whole’, the ‘ordinary’ bourgeoisie, and the
‘two great interests within the bourgeoisie’, landed property and capital, he
identified a ‘republican’, an ‘industrial’, a ‘commercial’, a ‘parliamentary’, a
‘big’ and a ‘democratic-republican petty’ bourgeoisie. Marx, ed. Fernbach
op. cit.
59 p.281, Tombs, op. cit. He noted that by the early twentieth century there were
a range of employer associations, but ‘most did little more than organize an
annual dinner.’ p.290, ibid.
60 p.280, ibid.
61 Zeldin began by saying ‘Nothing is more difficult to define than the bour-
geoisie’, referred to its ‘deep fragmentation’ and then illustrated at length the
impossibility of identifying its distinctive values. pp.11–22, Zeldin, op. cit. For
Maza, it was ‘a critical counter-norm’, the ‘quintessential other’, a scapegoat
rather than social reality, and comparable in some respects to French views of
‘the Jew’ and ‘the American’. pp.193–4, Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French
Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2003.
62 Jules Fabre, Le Barreau de Paris, Delamotte, Paris, 1895; Lucien Karpik, Les
Avocats Entre l’Etat, le public et le marché, Gallimard, Paris, 1995.
63 F. Foiret, Une Corporation Parisienne Pendant La Révolution, Champion, Paris,
1912.
64 Ezra N. Suleiman, Private Power and Centralization in France: The Notaires and
the State, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1987.
65 There are five administrative grands corps: the Conseil d’État, Cour des Comptes,
Inspection des Finance, Corps Préfectural, and the Corps Diplomatiques, and two
technical ones, the Corps des Mines, and the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées,
though the latter were not confined to their original missions.
66 Jean Petôt, Histoire de l’Administration des Ponts et Chaussées, 1599–1815, Paris,
1858; Andre Guillermé, Corps à Corps sur la route: les routes, les chemins
et l’organization des services au XIXème siècle, Presse de l’ Ècole des Ponts
et Chaussées, 1984.
67 pp.359–61, Patrick J. Harrigan, ‘Secondary Education and the Professions
in the Second Empire’, pp.349–71, Comparative Studies in Society and History,
Vol. 17, No. 3, July 1975. For a superb account of their position relative to
other engineers see Terry Shinn, ‘From “corps” to “profession”: the emergence
and definition of industrial engineering in modern France’, pp.188–208,

Robert Fox and George Weisz, eds, The Organization of Science and Technology
in France, 1808–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980.
68 Two, Ponts et Chaussées and Mines, were formed under the ancien régime, six
during the revolution, including the Écoles Normales Supérieures in 1791, and
the École Polytechnique in 1794, one under the First Empire, five during the
36 years of the Restored and July Monarchies, three under the Second Empire,
33 under the Third Republic, eight under the Fourth, and five, so far, under
the Fifth. pp.133–5, Bourdieu, op. cit.
69 pp.86, 215–17, 277, John Weiss, The Making of Technological Man: The Social
Origins of French Engineering Education, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982. By 1914
one quarter of its membership were non-centraliens. pp.194–6, 204, Shinn,
op. cit.
70 pp.176–91, Michael Burrage, Revolution and the Making of the Contemporary
Legal Profession, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006.
71 pp.88–99, Robert Fox, ‘Science, the university and the state in nineteenth
century France, pp.66–145, VIII, Science Industry and the Social order in Post-
Revolutionary France, Variorum, Aldershot, 1995. State intervention appears to
have created a similar conception, and a similar lack of professional solidarity
in le corps enseignement du second dégre, the teachers of public secondary
schools. For an overview pp.181–205, Jean-Michel Chapoulie, Les Professeurs
de l’Enseignement Secondaire: Un Métier De Classes Moyenne, Éditions de la
Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, Paris, 1987.
72 pp.70–7, Fox, op. cit.
73 Robert Fox, ‘The Savant Confronts his Peers: Scientific Societies in France
1815–1914’, pp.241–82 in Robert Fox, ed., The Culture of Science in France
1700–1900, Variorum, Aldershot, 1992, and ‘Learning, Politics and Polite
Culture in Provincial France: The Sociétés Savantes in the Nineteenth Century’.
pp.543–64, ibid.
74 George Weisz, ‘The politics of medical professionalization in France,
1845–1848’, pp.1–30, Journal of Social History, Vol. 12, 1978.
75 In the twentieth century their associations, although receiving state subsidies,
have remained weak, and rather quarrelsome. see pp.139–47, 152–5, David
Wilsford, ‘Physicians and the State in France’, pp.130–56, in Giorgio Freddi
and James Warner Björkman, eds, Controlling Medical Professionals: The
Comparative Politics of Health Maintenance, Sage, London, 1989.
76 Carlos Ramirez, ‘Expertise, profession, institution: the emergence of a profes-
sional identity: accounting practitioners in France 1920–1939’, Working Paper,
Sociology Department, LSE, 1998.
77 Associations were formed in Liverpool and London in 1870, Manchester in
1871, Sheffield in 1877 and after together forming a national society their
members applied for a charter which was granted in 1880. For chronology
and sources pp.284–5, Derek Matthews, Malcolm Anderson and John Richard
Edwards, The Priesthood of Industry: The Rise of the Professional Accountant in
British Management, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998.
78 They tried to organize as an independent profession, but were also divided by
their dependence on the state, and they efforts came to naught. pp.114–37,
David Van Zanten, Designing Paris: The Architecture of Duban, Labrouste, Duc
and Vaudoyer, MIT, Cambridge, 1987.
79 Christophe Charle, ‘Academics or Intellectuals? The Professors of the Uni-
versity of Paris and Political Debate in France from the Dreyfus Affair to the
Algerian War’. pp.94–116, in Jeremy Jennings, ed., Intellectuals in Twentieth

Century France: Mandarins and Samurais, St. Martin’s Press, London, 1993.
80 p.211, Stefan Collini, ‘Intellectuals in Britain and France in the Twentieth
Century: Confusions, Contrasts and Convergence?’, pp.119–225, ibid.
81 Luc Boltanski, The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society, trans by Arthur
Goldhammer, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
82 pp.39–83, ibid.
83 pp.93–4, 142–3, ibid.
84 The distinctively French character of this class was corroborated at about this
time by Humblet. In a comparison of the steel industry in France, Britain and
Belgium, he observed that in France alone, ‘awareness of the distinctiveness of
the management function, and the need to defend the material and social
advantages of the members … shows itself in independent managerial union-
ism whose success is incontestable.’ pp.355, 358, J.E. Humblet, ‘A Com-
parative Study of Management in Three Countries’, pp.351–60, The Sociological
Review, New Series, November 1961.
85 The rise and decline of the former is analysed in Jean Ruhlmann, ‘Comment
Défendre Les Classes Moyennes?’, pp.117–26, Jean Garrigues, ed., Les Groupes
de Pression dans la vie contemporaine en France et aux États-Unis de 1820 à nos
jours, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 2002.
86 p.85, Suzanne Berger, ‘Regime and interest representation: the French tra-
ditional middle classes’, pp.83–101, in Suzanne D. Berger, ed., Organizing
Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism and the Transformation of
Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981. After failing to identify
any corporate life in the bourgeoisie of an earlier era, Maza came to a similar
conclusion. p.204, Maza, op. cit.
87 pp.86–8, ibid. Specifically, the associations which represented peasants and
farmers, notably, the Fédération National des Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricoles
declined, while specialist producer and interest groups prospered.
88 p.90, ibid.
89 The prehistory and history of which is reviewed in Sylvie Guillaume,
‘La CGPME: un autre groupe patronal, de Matignon à Grenelle’, pp.143–53, in
Garrigues, ed., op. cit.
90 p.98, ibid.
91 pp.99–100, ibid.
92 such as Alexandre Wickman et Sophie Coignard, La Nomenklatura Franç-
aise: Pouvoirs et privileges des elites, Belfond, Paris, 1986; Michel Schifres,
L’Enaklatura, J.C. Lattés, Paris 1987; Saint-Guillaume, Le gaspillage des
élites: confessions d’un nomenklaturiste français, Laffont, Libertés, Paris,
2000.
93 Mattei Dogan, ‘Is there a Ruling Class in France?’ pp.17–90, in Mattei Dogan,
ed., Elite Configurations at the Apex of Power, Brill, Leiden, 2003.
94 p.69, ibid.
95 pp.70–4, ibid.
96 pp.29–30, ibid.
97 Perhaps I have been overly influenced by Nathan Leites, The Rules of the Game
in Paris, trans by Derek Coltman, Chicago, 1969, but the more conventional
narrative in Philip Williams, Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth
Republic, Longman, London, 1958, does not lead to a radically different
conclusion.
98 p.66, Dogan, op. cit.
99 for the steady decline of advocates pp.95–8, Yves-Henri Gaudemet, Les Juristes
et la Vie Politique de la IIIe République, Presses Universitaires, Paris, 1970.
101 p.199, Aram J. Kevorkian, Confessions of a Francophile, 1980–2000 Taderon
Press, Reading, 2002. Kevorkian wittily and perceptively commented, for
some 20 years, on French political life, and in particular on what he called the
‘functionary class’. He credited this observation to his barber.
102 p.156, Martin Shapiro, Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis, University
of Chicago, Chicago, 1981.
103 Some empirical evidence about this practice is obtainable from Thierry
Dimbour and Marion Paoletti, ‘Radiographie des parlementaires cumulants en
Gironde’, May, 2005, http://c6r33.free.fr and from Julien Dewoghélaëre, Raul
Magni Berton and Julien Navarro ‘“Cumul des Mandats” in Contemporary
French Politics. An Empirical Study of the XIIe législature of the Assemblée
Nationale’, March 2006, http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr Both sources suggest
that legislative attempts to restrict the practice in 2000 and 2003 have had
little impact. See also p.124, Kevorkian op. cit.
105 p.63, ibid.
106 Dogan’s figures would come as no surprise to Bauer who discussed and docu-
mented the separation of wealth and power in France. pp.100, 283–6, Michel
Bauer avec Bénédicte Bertin-Mouriot, Les 200: Comment devient-on un grand
patron? Seuil, Paris, 1987.
108 The theoretical possibility of such a class formation was famously sketched by
Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay of Education
and Equality, Penguin, Harmonsworth, 1961. However, he expected that, in
due course, it would become hereditary.
109 This, and more comparative evidence of this kind, is to be found in John
U. Nef, Industry and Government in France and England 1540–1640, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, 1957.
110 For a brief account of its predecessors, and the development of its marketing
techniques, see pp.2–25, William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in
Eighteenth-Century France, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996.
111 Frederick B. Artz, The Development of Technical Education in France 1500–1850,
Society for the History of Technology, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1966.
112 Meyers provides examples both of the state unilaterally assuming responsibil-
ity, and of the voluntary surrender of private training facilities. pp.138–50,
Frederic Meyers, Training in European Enterprises, Institute of Industrial
Relations, University of California, Los Angeles, 1969.
113 In the latest OECD comparison of 45 countries it is, however, just surpassed
by the Czech Republic. p.44, Education at a Glance, Paris, 2005.
114 pp.126–7, Charles Sumner Lobingier, pp.114–34, ‘Napoleon and his Code’,
Harvard Law Review, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, 1918; Esmein similarly concluded that
the Code of Commerce was ‘scarcely more than a revised and amended
edition of the ordonnances of 1673 and 1681.’ p.127, A. Esmein, A History of
Continental Criminal Procedure, Murray, London, 1914.
115 Charles E. Freedeman, Joint-Stock Enterprise in France 1807–1867, N. Carolina,
Chapel Hill, 1979.
116 The state was simultaneously involved in the exchanges on which their shares
were traded. pp.45–51, John C. Coffee, Jr. ‘The rise of dispersed ownership:
the roles of law and the state in the separation of ownership and control’,
pp.1–79, Yale Law Journal, Vol. 111, No. 1, 2001.
117 pp.2, 9, 18, 20–3, 26–7, 29–31, Daniel F. Muzyka, et al., The Climate for Growth
Entrepreneurship in Europe, INSEAD, Paris, 2000; pp.14, 18, 21, 32, 48–9, Bench-
marking Enterprise Policy: Results from the 2002 Scorecard, European Commission,
Brussels, 2002.http://europa.eu.int
118 p.217, Frank Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain and
France in the Railway Age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.
119 p.134, ibid.
120 pp.132, 136, ibid.
121 Private owners were, it is true, somewhat freer on the ‘lines of local interest’,
though even these were under the control of the local prefects. Private lines
on private property also needed ministerial approval. pp.115, 132–4, 157, ibid.
122 Donald Reid, The Miners of Decazeville: A Genealogy of De-Industrialization,
University Press, Harvard Cambridge, Mass., 1985. Herrick Chapman’s State
Capitalism and Working Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry, University
of California, Berkeley, 1991.
123 pp.82–7, Andrew Shonfield, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public
and Private Power, Oxford University Press, London, l965.
124 Pierre Puaux, Les Chambres de commerce et d’industries, Harmattan, Paris, 2003
and Philippe Lacombrade, ‘L’Assemblée des presidents des Chambres de Com-
merce: naissance d’in contre-pouvoir, 1899–1914’, in Garrigues, op. cit.; Jean-
Pierre Daviet, ‘Trade Associations or Agreements and Controlled Competition
in France, 1830–1939’, pp.269–95, in Hiroaki Yamazaki and Matao Miyamoto,
eds, Trade Associations in Business History, University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo,
1988.
125 p.273, ibid. He gave examples from the textile, glass, aluminium, iron, steel,
mining, electrical equipment and chemical industries.
126 Adrian Jones, ‘Illusions of Sovereignty: Business and the Organization of
Committees in Vichy France’, Social History, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1986.
127 p.130, Shonfield, op. cit.
128 pp.43–6, Jonah D. Levy, Tocqueville’s Revenge: State, Society & Economy in
Contemporary France, Cambridge, Harvard, 1999. For fuller details pp.129–39,
Michel Durupty, Les Entreprises Publiques, Vol. 1, Presses universitaires de
France, Paris, 1986.
129 pp.46–51, Levy, op. cit.
130 pp.51–66, Levy, op. cit.
131 The remaining partly-privatized state sector is listed in the website of the
Agence des participations de l’État www.ape.minefi.gouv.fr
132 p.57, Michel Bauer, ‘The Politics of State-Directed Privatisation: the case of
France 1986–1988’, pp.49–60, West European Politics, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1988,
cited by p.67, Levy, op. cit.
133 Fabrice Demarigny, ‘Independent Administrative Authorities in France’,
pp.164–79, in Giandomenico Majone, ed., Regulating Europe, Routledge,
London, 1996. The Commission de la Concurrence could permit agreements
between firms if it thought they were conducive to economic progress.
However, the Minister of Economics controlled the actions of the Com-
mission, and as Demarigny coyly concluded, ‘the sociological proximity of
members of the Council to the administration … is not to be doubted.’ p.179,
ibid.
134 p.57, Levy, op. cit.
135 pp.134–5, 166–8, 222, ibid.

136 The following account is drawn from L’Experience Française du Minitel:
Leçons Pour le Commerce Electronique, OECD, Paris, 1998.
137 pp.19–20, ibid.
138 It had earlier established compatibility in the other direction, that is, access to
Minitel for PC users via ‘emulation boards’ and later for all internet users. It
can therefore be consulted via minitel.fr or minitel.com
139 In the year 2000 there were still five million terminals in use. ‘Reports of
Minitel’s death are an exaggeration’ according to Brad Spurgeon, ‘Minitel
Hangs on in the Internet Age, p.6, International Herald Tribune, 14th March,
2001.
140 on www.service-public.fr
141 pp.207–9, Jean Chesnais, ‘France’ in Richard R. Nelson, ed. National Innovation
Systems: A Comparative Analysis, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993.
142 p.33, Philippe Mustar, ‘L’entrepreneur Schumpeterien a-t-il jamais existe?’,
Annales des Mines, Mars, 1994.
143 The PD-G of one large French company, Jeumont-Schneider, strongly objected
to political interference, and later reported his conversation in the Elysée with
President Pompidou. ‘And do you know what M. Pompidou had the audacity
to tell me? That Ambrose Roux (president of the state-owned Compagnie
Générale d’Electricité) would like to merge Alsthom with Jeumont … That he,
the President of the Republic would like to see negotiations begin to effect
this desire, so that France will have only one giant enterprise in the field of
electrical materials.’ p.121, Roger Prioret, Les Français Mystifiés, Grasset, Paris,
1973 cited p.262, Ezra N. Suleiman, Elites in French Society: The Politics of
Survival, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1978. The PD-G in ques-
tion was, however, Belgian, and it may be that a Frenchman would have
found the President’s advice more palatable. This merger did not in fact take
place, though Jeumont-Schneider later merged with another French electrical
company, Framatome.
144 pp.71–2, 128–30, Shonfield, op. cit.
145 pp.133–4, Bourdieu, op. cit. No one seems to agree on how many there are.
Ardagh observed that ‘140 lay claim to the rank’, p.150, John Ardagh, France
in the 1980s, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1982. Dogan suggested that ‘approx-
imately 160 schools with about 40,000 students are considered as grandes
écoles’. p.46fn, Dogan, op. cit.
146 Specifically it mentions ‘une formation longue polyvalente et généraliste, de 5 à 6
ans après le bac’, and ‘une coopération très étroite avec les milieux économiques,
pour la formation, la recherche, l’innovation et la valorisation de produits nou-
veaux.’ www.cge.asso.fr
147 pp.191–2, Shinn, op. cit. He mentioned a couple of other examples of schools
formed as a result of private or semi-private initiatives. p.198, op. cit.
148 for a general survey see Christophe Charle, pp.1115–37, ‘Le Pantouflage en
France (vers 1880–vers 1980)’, Annales Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 5, 1987.
pp.107–9, Maurice Levy-Leboyer, ‘Innovation and Business Strategies in Nine-
teenth and Twentieth Century France’, in Edward C. Carter et al., Enterprise
and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century France, Johns Hopkins,
Baltimore, 1976. Over the years 1880 to 1955, on average about 30% of inspec-
teurs des finances moved into the private sector, and about the same propor-
tion of the corps des mines, though the percentage rose over the twentieth
century p.229, Suleiman, 1978, op. cit.
149 pp.142–4, Pierre Birnbaum, Les Sommets de l’état: essai sur l’elite du pouvoir
en France, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1977.
150 pp.183–4, Granick, 1972, op. cit. Most of the ‘non-prestigious’ were in the
textile, food and paper industries, and appear to have defined themselves by
their reluctance or inability to recruit graduates of the grandes écoles.
151 pp.198, 232–5, ibid.
152 pp.119–21, Dean Savage, Founders, Heirs & Managers: French Industrial Leader-
ship in Transition, Sage, London, 1979.
153 p.181, Bauer and Bertin-Mouriot, 1987, op. cit.
154 p.70, ibid.
155 p.182, ibid. The full list of the 25 firms in this heterogeneous sector is given
on pp.278–9, ibid. In 1995 Bauer et al. reported that just over half of all
chief executives, in all industrial sectors, came from grandes écoles, pp.70–1
M. Bauer, Bertin-Mouriot and P. Thobois, Les No. 1 des 200 plus grandes entre-
prises en France et en Grande Bretagne, Paris, CNRS/Boyden, 1995.
156 p.300, Bourdieu, op. cit. His italics.
157 pp.322–30, ibid.
158 pp.211, 219, Charles Kadushin, ‘Friendship Among the French Financial
Elite’, pp.202–21, American Sociological Review, Vol. 60, 1995. ENA is the École
nationale d’administration, now perhaps the most illustrious grande école.
159 Suleiman reported that in 1975 over 60% of the directors of the largest (public)
banks in France were former inspecteurs des finances, though what they knew of
commercial banking mystified many observers. p.117ff, Suleiman, 1978, op. cit.
Bauer and his colleagues found that 80% of the chief executives of banks had
attended these grandes écoles. pp.87–8, Bauer et al., 1995, op. cit. Financial institu-
tions were the most popular destination for enarques between 1960 and 1990.
p.30, Michel Bauer avec Benedicte Bertin-Mourot, L’ENA: Est-elle une business
school? Études sociologiques sur les Énarques devenus cadres d’entreprise de 1960–1990,
L’Harmittan, Paris, 1997.
160 pp.65–7, Pierre Birnbaum et al., La Classe Dirigeante Française: dissociation,
interpenetration, intégration, Presses Universitaire de France, Paris, 1978. He
provides flow charts of inter-sectoral pantouflage.
161 pp.87–108, Lenard R. Berlanstein, Big Business and Industrial Conflict in
Nineteenth-Century France: A Social History of the Paris Gas Company, University
of California Press, Berkeley, 1991.
162 p.110, ibid.
163 p.111, ibid.
164 pp.122, 199, 206 ibid.
165 Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, University of Chicago, 1963. His
finding were repeatedly corroborated by Berlanstein’s research on gas workers
at the beginning of the century. pp.230, 308ff, Berlanstein, op. cit.
166 pp.38–47, 52–3, 128–39, Jacques Henri Horovitz, Top Management Control in
Europe, Macmillan, London, 1980.
167 p.96, ibid.
168 p.93, ibid.
169 The British boards were more collegial, an average of 69% of board members
being ‘insiders’, i.e. executives working in the organization, while in most of
the French companies ‘the chief executive (Président Directeur Général) is the
only one to sit on the board of directors, which is one further reason why
many decisions go up to his office.’
170 pp.84, 94, ibid.
171 pp.112, 124, ibid.

172 Tori Ishii et al., Engineers, Organization and Innovation: Training Systems and
Organization of Technical Skill in Japanese and French Firms in the Electronics and
Chemicals Industries, Japan Institute of Labour, Tokyo, 1995.
173 p.48, ibid.
174 pp.38, 41, ibid.
175 p.57, ibid.
176 However, initial educational qualifications determined career opportunities
rather less comprehensively than in the chemical company. About a quarter
of all engineers and managers had been internally promoted.
177 There was also an administrative division between personnel. Technicians
and supervisory staff, along with manual and clerical staff, were managed at
local level, while engineers and managers were managed from head office.
p.38, ibid.
178 p.81, ibid.
179 pp.48, 167, 195 ibid.
180 pp.82–4, ibid.
181 p.195, ibid.
182 pp.84, 195, ibid.
183 Dogan claimed that the sequence of ‘periodical beheadings’ and ‘elite circulation’
that included 1814, 1830, 1848 and 1945 continued during the Fifth Republic, in
1968, 1981, 2002, but gave no evidence to support this argument. p.69, Dogan,
op. cit. The mini-peaks of pantouflage following elections or changes of govern-
ment hardly seem to qualify pp.4–5, Bauer and Bertin-Mouriot, 1997, op. cit.
184 pp.103, Bourdieu, op. cit. The socialization of a corpsard is described
pp.146–69, Bauer, 1987; and pp.188ff, Weiss, op. cit.
185 for an account of the regime at one school at the turn of the century pp.33–4,
F. Fichet-Poitrey, Le corps des ponts et chaussées: du génie Civil à l’aménagement
du territoire, Paris, 1982; A. Brunot and R. Coquand, Le corps des ponts et
chaussées, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris, 1982.
187 for some examples pp.49, 81, ibid.; pp.124–7, Bourdieu; pp.176–84, Suleiman,
1978, op. cit.
188 pp.45–8, 142–3, ibid.
189 pp.184–5, ibid.
190 The schools were, he thought, ‘both different and interdependent … both in
competition and complementary, and involved in increasingly long and
complex circuits of legitimating exchanges.’ p.386, Bourdieu, op. cit.
191 Suleiman observed that graduates of elite grandes écoles ‘rarely … find their
way into foreign multinational enterprises.’ p.240, Suleiman, op. cit. His infor-
mants led him to think that it was a matter of choice on their part rather than
indifference on the part of foreign companies.
192 In 2005, when PepsiCo was rumoured to be preparing a bid for Danone, a
French yoghourt company, the Prime Minister and his fellow ministers rushed
to defend ‘one of our national treasures’. Danone was already 42% foreign-
owned, and 24% of its shares were held by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ funds. ‘France faces up
to foreign ownership of industrial treasures,’ Agence France Presse, 24th July, 2005
and www.tblonline.com Baromètre trimestriel, Les Echos, 2005.
193 pp.244, 255, Bauer, 1987, op. cit.
194 p.54, ibid.
195 pp.78, 82–3, ibid.
Chapter 6 Civil Society Acts Alone in the United States

1 The 102 settlers of the Plymouth Colony agreed to ‘combine ourselves into a
civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and … frame such
just and equal laws … as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the
general good of the colony, unto which we promise all due submission and
obedience’ www.plimouth.org For a discussion of this and other cases pp.167,
173, 308 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973.
2 In 1632, Charles I granted George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, ownership
and absolute authority over the inhabitants of the more than 10 million acres
that became Maryland. However, his absolutist aspirations were no more suc-
cessful than those of his royal patron. p.29, Eric Labaree, America’s Nation-
Time 1607–1789, Norton, New York, 1972.
3 pp.67–82, 158, ibid.
4 Understandably, the myth is celebrated every 4th July. President George
W. Bush constantly reiterates it. In his Independence Day address in 2002, for
instance, he claimed ‘And all Americans … can draw a straight line from the
free lives we lead today to that one moment, when the world changed
forever. From that day in 1776, freedom has had a home, and freedom has
had a defender. (Applause.)’ www.whitehouse.gov
5 The bequest was, however, in stock, which subsequently proved worthless.
David Madsen, The National University: Enduring Dream of the United States of
America, Wayne State University, Detroit, 1967.
6 Sheldon Rothblatt and Martin Trow, ‘Government Policies and Higher Edu-
cation: Britain and the United States 1630–1860’, in C. Crouch and A. Heath,
eds, The Sociology of Social Reform, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992. The
federal government was similarly reluctant to assert a central co-ordinating
role over scientific research and remained so until World War II. See
A. Hunter Dupree, ‘Central Scientific Organization in the United States’,
pp.261–77, in Norman Kaplan, ed., Science and Society, Rand McNally,
Chicago, 1965.
7 His argument rested, however, primarily on states’ rights grounds.
8 B. Zorina Khan & Kenneth Sokoloff, ‘Patent Institutions, Industrial Organ-
ization and Early Technological Change, 1790–1850’, pp.292–313, Maxine
Berg & Kristine Bruland, Technological Revolutions: Historical Perspectives, Elgar,
Cheltenham, 1998.
9 pp.20–39, 117–37, Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage, from property to
democracy, 1760–1860, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1968. In the
colonies, Williamson estimated that between 50% and 75% of white adult
males could vote, though ‘some communities exceeded this proportion and
some fell below.’ While the suffrage was substantially broadened in the wake
of the revolution, only one state, Vermont, introduced universal manhood
suffrage without any tax or property qualification whatever. pp.38, 135–6,
ibid.
10 For the rapid transition from special to general laws of incorporation in
various states see Edwin Merrick Dodd, American Business Corporations Until
1860, with special reference to Massachusetts, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 1954.
11 p.vii, Abram Chayes, Introduction, John P. Davis, Corporations: A Study of the
Origin and Development of Great Business Combinations and of their Relation to
the Authority of the State, Capricorn, New York, 1961.
12 pp.28–31, Donald Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and

Universities Before the Civil War, Columbia University, New York, 1932.
13 pp.3–4, Martin Trow, ‘Latent Functions of Continuing Education’, Paper
presented at Hässelby Slott, Stockholm, May 1987.
14 p.12, ibid.
15 p.74, Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and
Opportunities for Study, published for the Institute of Early American History
and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill, 1960.
16 p.98, ibid.
17 p.49, ibid.
18 Education, however, never became a legally-enforceable civil right, except
under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, meaning a
right to education equal to that being provided to others. John C. Eastman,
‘When Did Education Become a Civil Right? An Assessment of State Consti-
utional Provisions for Education 1776–1900’, pp.1–34, American Journal of
Legal History, Vol. XLII, 1998.
19 For examples of the educational provisions in the constitutions of five states,
plus that of the Northwest Ordinance, and the support from several of the
founding fathers see pp.210–32, Robert H. Bremner, Children and Youth in
America: A Documentary History, Vol. 1 1600–1865, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 1970. Bremner pointed out that while ‘nearly all state consti-
tutions committed the state to the support of education’, they were ‘permis-
sive rather than mandatory, authorizing rather than requiring…’ p.230,
ibid.
20 pp.86–92, David L. Madsen, Early National Education 1776–1830, Wiley,
New York, 1974.
21 p.461, Bremner, op. cit.
22 pp.251–67, Jürgen Kocka, White Collar Workers in America 1890–1940: A Social
Political History in International Perspective, trans by Maura Kealey, Sage,
London, 1980.
23 pp.134–8, J.S. Fuerst, ‘Public Housing in the United States’, pp.134–52,
J.S. Fuerst, ed., Public Housing in Europe and America, Croom Helm, London, 1974.
24 Jack Katz, Poor People’s Lawyers in Transition, Rutgers University Press, New
Brunswick, 1982.
25 pp.173–94, DeMott, op. cit.
26 The proposition, echoing the 15th and 19th amendments to the Constitution,
proposed that ‘The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential
treatment to, any individual or group, on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnic-
ity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public edu-
cation or public contracting.’ The continuing campaigns may be tracked by
numerous websites, such as CADAP, Californians Against Discrimination and
Preferences, Pacific Legal Foundation to Support 209, the Center for Individual
Rights et al.
27 The same prediction has, of course, often been made before see for example
the section ‘Affirmative Action: The Last Stage’, pp.34–63, The Public Interest,
No. 130, Winter 1998.
28 p.123, Robert M. McIver, The Web of Government, Macmillan, New York, 1947.
Alford pointed out that parties might, nonetheless, be ‘viewed by voters as
representing different social classes’ and cited survey data to support the
point. p.100, Alford, op. cit.
29 The evidence about post-revolutionary attacks on the organized bar is reviewed

pp.233–57, Burrage, 2006, op. cit.
30 pp.215–76, William G. Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century:
From Sects to Science, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1972.
31 pp.300–46, Leonard D. White, The Jacksonians: A Study in Public Administration
1829–1861, Free Press, New York, 1954.
32 pp.98–101, Evan Haynes, The Selection and Tenure of Judges, The National
Conference of Judicial Councils, Washington, 1944.
33 for an account of the ‘withering of establishments’ and ‘the rise of democratic
religious movements’ through the early decades of the republic see pp.59–122ff,
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, Yale University
Press, New Haven, 1989.
34 Over the period 1760–1840 the self-recruitment rate rose among graduate
members of the Suffolk bar (i.e. Boston) from 38% to 55%, and among non-
graduates from 55% to 63%. pp.172–5, Gerard W. Gawalt, The Promise of
Power: The Emergence of the Legal Profession in Massachusetts 1760–1840, Westport,
1979.
35 The best documented case is the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Illinois, to which
Lincoln belonged in the late 1830s. pp.23ff, 168–71, John P. Frank, Lincoln as
a Lawyer, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1961.
36 p.5, G.W. Pepper, Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, Philadelphia Law
Association, Philadelphia, 1895; pp.207–9, Gary Nash, ‘The Philadelphia
Bench and Bar 1800–1860’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, pp.203–20,
Vol. 7, 1965; pp.151–2, Lawrence Friedman, A History of American Law, Simon
& Schuster, New York, 1973.
37 p.258, Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in
the American City, 1760–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989.
38 pp.255–7, ibid.
39 p.297, ibid.
40 pp.189–90 ibid. He briefly noted that public policies were favourable to ‘the
class interests of urban middling folk’, and mentioned ‘toleration and support
for business enterprise, low taxation, improvement of urban services’ such as
mass transit and sidewalks. p.255, ibid.
41 pp.290–6, ibid.
42 pp.96–113, Paul P. Van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service, Row,
Peterson, Evanston, Ill., 1958.
43 Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in Europe, A Report to the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Bulletin No. 6, New York,
1912; Albert Z. Reed, Training for the Public Profession of the Law, Bulletin
No. 15, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, New York
City, 1921. Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, Report of
the Investigation into Engineering Education, 1923–1929, 2 vols, Pittsburgh,
1934.
44 J. Richard Woodworth, ‘Some Influences on the Reform of Schools of Law and
Medicine, 1890 to 1930’, Sociological Quarterly, 14, 1973.
45 In 1900 all medical societies had together recruited under one-third, by
1910 ‘half the physicians in the country’ were members of the AMA, and
by 1940 two-thirds. By 1971, however, this had fallen to 50% and by 1981 to
48% of male and 27% of female physicians. pp.109–10, 273, 427, Paul Starr,
The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Basic, New York, 1982. The
AMA declined to give more recent figures.
46 For an example from one state, Theodore J. Schneyer, ‘The Incoherence of the
Unified Bar Concept: Generalizing from the Wisconsin Case’, American Bar
Foundation Journal, Vol. 14, 1983.
47 pp.237–9, Edwin T. Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility an
the American Engineering Profession, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland,
1971. The dependence of most engineering societies on business is explained.
pp.1–19, ibid.
48 Significantly, the only association of licensed engineers, the National Society
of Professional Engineers, was the most cohesive and durable engineering
association, and was also the one that was most free of business influence.
p.239, ibid.
49 pp.315–62, Van Riper, op. cit.
50 pp.273–6, 347–52, ibid. For exclusive recognition and collective bargaining
agreements which included blue, white collar and professional civil servants
see Union Recognition in the Federal Government, United States Civil Service
Commission, Washington, D.C. 1968; pp.20, 30, Collective Bargaining Agree-
ments in the Federal Civil Service, Late 1971, Bulletin 1789, U.S. Department of
Labor, Washington, D.C. 1973.
51 In 1930 the ABA claimed 17% of all judges and practising lawyers were mem-
bers. It now claims 50%. www.abanet.org, p.129, Esther Lucille Brown, Lawyers
and the Promotion of Justice, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1938; fn 45,
supra.
52 Evidence to support this proposition, especially by comparison with England,
is examined below p.260, infra, fn 148–50.
53 For the high proportion of university-trained managers see Charles Handy, The
Making of Modern Managers: Management Education Training and Development in
the USA, West Germany, France, Japan and the U.K., NEDO, London, 1989. For mea-
sures of the low level of technical training among manual workers see D. Blanch-
flower and L. Lynch, ‘Training at Work: A Comparison of U.S. and British
Youths’, Discussion Paper No. 78, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, 1992;
Exhibit 23, ‘Aggregate Analysis’, pp.1, 8 ‘Synthesis’ McKinsey Global Institute,
Driving Productivity and Growth in the U.K. Economy, Washington, D.C. 1998.
54 p.439, Arthur Shadwell, Industrial Efficiency: A Comparative Study of Industrial
Life in England, Germany and the United States, Longmans Green, London,
1906.
55 Kaelbe’s collection of unmatched, non-random samples from the early indus-
trial period led him to suggest that ‘higher education among business leaders
seems to have been more frequent in the three European countries than in
the U.S. in the late nineteenth century’. However, his later, fuller evidence led
him to add that ‘the proportion … with higher education seems to have
increased more rapidly in the U.S. than in the three European countries.’
p.418, Hartmut Kaelbe, ‘Long-term changes in the Recruitment of the Business
Elite: Germany compared to the U.S., Great Britain and France since the
Industrial Revolution’, pp.404–23, Journal of Social History, Spring, 1980. The
low proportion of skilled workers is documented below. p.260 infra.
56 p.8, Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the English Working Class, Preface to the
American Edition, 1892, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1953.
57 p.77, Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword,
Norton, New York, 1996.
58 The high rates of labour violence are documented though the comparisons
with other countries remain impressionistic. p.380, Philip Taft and Philip
Ross, ‘American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character and Outcome’,

pp.281–395, Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds, The History of
Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Praeger, New York,
1969. A comparison of civil strife in various nations between the years
1961–1968 found that there was more participation in violent protests, and
more injuries suffered as a result, than in other countries, especially than the
United Kingdom, pp.579, Ted Robert Gurr, ‘A Comparative Study of Civil
Strife’, pp.572–625, ibid.
59 The societal factors he lists are the absence of feudalism, a liberal tradition
which included many socialist values, individualist and anti-statist values, the
high standard of living, the political isolation of those with low incomes,
higher upward social mobility and higher geographic mobility, and the con-
sequences of being a multi-ethnic and multi-racial immigrant society. The
political factors are the early extension of the suffrage, the two-coalition party
system, its readiness to steal the thunder of third parties, and repression.
pp.84–8, Lipset, 1996, op. cit.
60 pp.11, 231, John H.M. Laslett, Colliers Across the Sea: A Comparative Study of
Class Formation in Scotland and the American Midwest, 1830–1924, University of
Illinois Press, Urbana, 2000.
61 Lazerson went so far as to say ‘not until after 1870 did schools touch the mass of
Americans. Only Massachusetts had passed a compulsory attendance statute
during the antebellum period and that had been infrequently enforced.’ p.xiv,
Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts,
1870–1915, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
62 p.227, Laslett, op. cit.
63 p.276, Martin Trow, ‘Class, Race, and Higher Education in America’,
pp.275–93, Gary Marks and Larry Diamond, eds, Reexamining Democracy, Sage,
London, 1992. This entire argument has been heavily influenced by Trow’s
sparkling essay.
64 By 1947, for instance, United States Dept of Commerce, Historical Statistics of
the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, GPO, Washington, DC, 1975. One
only has to consider accounts of early organized labour in the United States
alongside any of the standard accounts of their British counterparts to realize
that educational opportunity was fundamental to the former from an early
date, and a marginal issue for the latter. See, for instance, any or all of the
contributors to John R. Commons, et al., eds, History of Labour in the United
States, Vol. 1, Macmillan, New York, 1918–1935. The reason for this difference
will be clear from the discussion on pp.268–9, infra.
65 Tables 607, 648. The figures are for 2004. U.S. Census Bureau, op. cit.
66 For examples, on racial distinctions, see Edna Bonacich, ‘Advanced Capitalism
and Black/White Race Relations in the United States: A Split Labor Market
Interpretation, pp.34–51, American Sociological Review, 41, 1976. An example
of the argument that’ ethnic divisions … created barriers between groups of
workers, restricting possible avenues of cooperation’ is Walter Korpi and
Michael Shalev ‘Strikes, Industrial Relations and Class Conflict in Capitalist
Societies’, pp.164–87, British Journal of Sociology, 30, 2, 1979.
67 pp.330–4, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans by Henry Reeve,
Vol. 1. Vintage, New York, 1945.
68 for some of it see pp.273–9, Burrage, 2006, op. cit.
69 Marshall’s account of the way in which it infiltrated into the union move-
ment, despite the declared opposition of the national leadership of the AFL, is
one telling illustration. Ray Marshall, ‘Black and White Blue-Collar Workers
and Unions’, pp.176–203 in Sar A. Levitan, ed., Blue Collar Workers: A Sym-
posium on Middle America, McGraw Hill, New York, 1971.
70 ibid.; Herbert Hill, ‘Racial Barriers in Union-Apprentice Programs’ in Alan
F. Westin, ed., Freedom Now! The Civil-Rights Struggle in America, Basic Books,
New York, 1964.
71 pp.178–80, Marshall, op. cit.
72 p.122, S.M. Lipset and W.S. Schneider, The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor and
Government in the Public Mind, Free Press, New York, 1983; p.58 Zweig, op. cit.
However, since the overall rate of unionization among blacks in 2004 was
only 15% vs 12.2% for whites, it seems unlikely that this has translated into
higher rates of union membership in comparable jobs. Table 648, Statistical
Abstract of the United States, 2006, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, D.C.
2006.
73 Race certainly undermined the solidarity of San Francisco and Oakland long-
shoremen throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s, according to the memoirs of
one of them. He gave, however, little evidence to suggest that it displaced
class solidarity. pp.96–113, Reg Theriault, The Unmaking of the American
Working Class, New Press, New York, 2003.
74 p.566, Herbert G. Gutman, ‘Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing
America, 1815–1919’, American Historical Review, June, 1973. He is supported
by Marshall who argues that ‘white ethnics’ at least, ‘have given strong
support to the American labour movement.’ p.176, op. cit.
75 pp.176–81, Richard Schneirov and Thomas J. Suhrbur, Union Brotherhood,
Union Town: The History of the Carpenters’ Union of Chicago, 1893–1987,
Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1988.
76 Initially union leaders shared the employers’ view pp.201–16, Victor
R. Greene, The Slavic Community on Strike: Immigrant Labor in Pennsylvania
Anthracite, Notre Dame, Illinois, 1968. He gives examples of the importation
of immigrants as strikebreakers. pp.97–9, ibid.
77 pp.225–6, Laslett, op. cit. In 1870 Marx made a similar point about the
English. ‘England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile
camps. English proletarians and Irish proletarians. This antagonism is the
secret of the impotence of the English working class.’ p.506, Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, On Britain, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow,
1953.
78 p.215ff, William Kornblum, Blue Collar Community, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1974.
79 pp.210–11, ibid.
80 p.270, David Halle, America’s Working Man, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1984.
81 pp.251–2, 295, Blumin, op. cit.
82 pp.312, 328–30, Joshua B. Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor
Since World War II, New Press, New York, 2000. This post-1965 wave is also, of
course, post the Civil Rights Act 1964, and it is likely that granting legal
redress for racial discrimination against unions as well as employers may have
raised the salience of ethnic identities.
83 pp.18–21, Milton Cantor, ed., American Workingclass Culture: Explorations in
American Labor and Social History, Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1979.
Several other contributors to his volume provide supporting evidence. See
also David Montgomery, ‘The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in
the Kensington Riots of 1844’, pp.44–74, Peter N. Stearns and Daniel J.

Walkowitz, eds, Workers in the Industrial Revolution: Recent Studies of Labor in
the United States, Transaction Books, New Brunswick, N.J., 1974.
84 pp.17–18, James Holt, ‘Trade Unionism in the British and U.S. Steel
Industries, 1880–1914: a comparative study’, Labor History, 1977.
85 pp.47–51, Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American
Political Development, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1990.
86 They were formed in Philadelphia and Boston and elsewhere for brief
accounts of them all see Helen L. Sumner, ‘Citizenship’, pp.169–334,
Commons, op. cit.
87 Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American
Working Class, 1788–1850, Oxford University Press, New York, 2004, first pub-
lished in 1984.
88 pp.172–216, 236, ibid. One may observe that this early failure to form a
working class party poses a challenge to Mink’s argument which she did not
address.
89 pp.113–42, ibid.
90 pp.223–4, ibid.
91 p.299, ibid.
92 pp.219, 220, 234, ibid.
93 Wilentz does not consider the possibility that they did not meet the fate of
the Workingmen’s Parties precisely because they were able to represent the
working class without trying to organize all of it.
94 pp.55, 233–5, ibid.
95 pp.xii–xiv, Thompson, op. cit.
96 pp.16–18, Wilentz, op. cit.
97 Like Thompson, he also paid little heed to Marx’s warning that ‘only the
vulgar mind confuses trade disputes with class conflict.’
98 pp.219, 237, 242–3, ibid.
99 pp.52, 253, ibid.
100 pp.18–19, ibid. He found it difficult to make up his mind. While New York
was the ‘centre of working class action and labour radicalism in the indus-
trializing Republic’, the ‘classic scenes of industrial capitalist growth were to
be found elsewhere’. While it ‘remained the focal point of the American eco-
nomy, it was also an immigrant metropolis’, and for ‘millions of Americans,
New York was becoming an alien, menacing, almost un-American place.’
p.389, ibid. Over the same period Philadelphia workers seem to have been
considerably less class conscious, more inebriated, but also more attracted by
temperance and religious movements. Bruce Laurie, ‘“Nothing on Compul-
sion”: Lifestyles of Philadelphia Artisans 1820–1850’, pp.91–120, in Cantor,
op. cit.
101 pp.377–80, Wilentz, op. cit.
102 pp.254, 334, 350, 364, 383–6, ibid.
103 p.72, Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor
and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century, Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
1993.
104 pp.12–13, Engels, 1953, op. cit.
105 p.78, Voss, op. cit. The Knights were even the beginnings of an international
union, since some assemblies were also formed in England.
106 p.88, Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: Industrial Workers of the World, Eyre
and Spottiswode, London, 1967. It also had the support of a struggling,
proto-industrial American Railway Union formed by Eugene Debs, and of the

American branch of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers of Great Britain,
both of which had been expelled from the AFL. p.64, ibid.
107 www.iww.org In 1920, the IWW claimed to have 41,600 members p.84,
Wolman, op. cit.
108 pp.28–33, 126, Wilentz, op. cit. Bakers may have been an exception p.232,
ibid.
109 pp.406, 413, ibid. At several points Wilentz emphasizes the contribution of
immigrants. pp.352–6, 373, 364, ibid.
110 pp.232–5, Voss, op. cit.
111 p.386, Wilentz, op. cit. However, he had earlier decided that ‘What finally …
wrecked the union movement was neither official repression, nor political co-
optation but dearth and economic collapse.’ By dearth he meant, the failure
of the wheat crop in the summer of 1836. p.294, ibid.
112 p.232, Voss, op. cit.
113 p.20, Robert E. Weir, Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social
Movement, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2000.
114 Dubofsky is almost alone in questioning this common view. He emphasized
the IWW’s ‘internal deficiencies’, such as its failure to sign or respect collec-
tive bargaining agreements, and to explain how ‘it would achieve its new
society.’ What support it enjoyed was, he thought, due to its success in
obtaining immediate improvements in members’ working conditions, not to
its vision of a classless society. pp.480–4, Melvin Dubofsky, We Shall All Be All:
A History of the International Workers of the World, Quadrangle, Chicago, 1968.
115 p.85, Leo Wolman, The Growth of American Trade Unions, 1880–1923,
National Bureau of Economic Research, New York, 1924.
116 Morgan O. Reynolds, ‘An Economic Analysis of the Norris-LaGuardia Act, the
Wagner Act, and the Labor Representation Industry’, pp.227–66, Journal of
Libertarian Studies, Vol. VI, Summer-Fall, 1982.
117 p.44, Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? Trying to be for Labor When
It’s Flat on Its Back, Plume, New York, 1992.
118 pp.3–74, Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the
American Labor Movement, 1935–1941, Harvard University Press: Cambridge,
Mass., 1960.
119 p.233, Statistical Abstract of the United States. 81st edn, U.S. Dept of Commerce,
Washington, D.C., 1960.
120 pp.52, 55–7, Freeman, op. cit.
121 pp.99, 104, ibid.
122 pp.33, 43, 66–8, ibid.
123 pp.26, 41–7, ibid.
124 pp.32, 52, 337, ibid.
125 p.26, ibid.
126 pp.272, 325, ibid.
127 p.272, ibid.
128 This, of course, adds further support to the idea that the city’s class conscious-
ness had been continuously replenished from Europe. Post-1965 immigrants
were largely non-European.
129 pp.303, 312, 330, 332, ibid.
130 p.327, ibid.
131 In 2004, New York State had 6% of the U.S. labour force, but 12.9% of its
union members. Tables 581, 649, U.S. Census Bureau, op. cit.
132 The AFL-CIO claimed absolute numbers of union members increased slightly
between 2000–2001, from 12.9m to 13.2m. Report of the Executive Council,
AFL-CIO, 2002, but the Census Bureau did not register it. The Bureau of
Labour Statistics reported increases in absolute numbers in several years in the
1990s, but the density of membership consistently declined. pp.43–5, Jelle
Visser, ‘Union Membership Statistics in 24 Countries’, Monthly Labour Review,
January, 2006.
133 Canadian union density has always exceeded that of the United States, apart
from the period 1938–1958, which roughly coincides with the period when
the American was receiving the unqualified support of the Federal Govern-
ment pp.89, 96–108, Lipset, 1996, op. cit.
134 p.44, Geoghegan, op. cit.
135 The Wagner Act required the NLRB to base its definition of an appropriate
unit by ‘a community of interest among workers’, but after Taft-Hartley
it could not consider ‘workers’ wishes alone. Management personnel and
record-keeping practices were also relevant, so units could be defined by a
great variety of criteria. pp.40–7, William B. Gould, IV, A Primer on American
Labor Law, 3rd ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993.
136 Though such restraints were imported to England via one-union Japanese car
plants in the 1980s.
137 James A. Gross, Broken Promise: The Subversion of U.S. Labor Relations Policy,
1947–1994, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1995.
138 Levitt estimated that it had an annual turnover of more than $1 billion and
consisted of more than 10,000 highly paid anti-union consultants and attor-
neys, the former averaging about $1,000–$1,500 per day and the latter between
$300–$700. Martin Jay Levitt with Terry Conrow, Confessions of a Union
Buster, Crown, New York, 1993.
139 The decline of opinion poll approval ratings is documented in Seymour
Martin Lipset, ‘North American Labor Movements: A Comparative Perspective’.
pp.438–42, Seymour Martin Lipset, ed., Unions in Transition: Entering the
Second Century, ICS Press, San Francisco, 1986.
140 Edelstein and Warner devised 20 measures to compare union democracy, in
51 American and 31 British unions over the years 1946–1960. The British
emerged as more democratic, usually substantially more democratic, by 19 of
them. pp.87–113, J. David Edelstein and Malcolm Warner, Comparative Union
Democracy: Organization and Opposition in British and American Unions, Allen &
Unwin, London, 1975.
141 pp.138, 209, 279, Gross, op. cit.
142 Though as he points out, they mainly exposed corruption in one union, but
he thought that ‘labor unions came to mean Teamsters’. p.138, ibid. However,
for some earlier cases see pp.621–5, Galenson, op. cit.
143 pp.78, 199, 220, Lipset & Schneider, op. cit. For an account of how corruption
discredited New York City’s labour movement see pp.313–16, Freeman, op. cit.
144 While successive samples of Americans have been decidedly less favour-
able to all forms of government intervention to reduce inequalities than the
British, the striking exception has been government action to increase ‘oppor-
tunities for young people to go to college. In this respect, Americans have
always exceeded the British by a considerable margin. p.111, Davis, 1986,
op. cit.
145 p.159, Stanley H. Ruttenberg, ‘The Union Member Speaks’, pp.154–75, in
Levitan, op. cit.
146 p.221, Lee Rainwater, ‘Making the Good Life: working class family and
lifestyles’, pp.204–29, ibid.
147 pp.5, 8, Geoghegan, op. cit.
148 pp.366–7, Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition:
A Study in Culture Conflicts, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1937.
149 pp.444–9, ibid.
150 pp.27–34, ibid.
151 p.28, ibid. A union organizer’s account of his failure demonstrated the adverse
consequences of the competition between AFL and CIO unions, pp.28–34.
ibid.
152 p.359, ibid.
153 pp.455–8, ibid.
154 pp.459–60, ibid.
155 pp.42–4, ibid.
156 T. Caplow and B. Chadwick, ‘Inequality and Lifestyles in Middletown,
1920–1978’, pp.366–78, Social Science Quarterly, 60, 1979. For another follow-
up, in a ‘reality’ documentary film in 1990, see ‘Seventeen’ www.frif.com and
pp.253–60, DeMott, op. cit.
157 p.viii, James West, Plainville U.S.A. Columbia University Press, New York,
1945.
158 p.115, ibid
159 p.133, ibid.
160 pp.113, 119, ibid.
161 p.128, ibid.
162 pp.192–4, ibid.
163 p.223, ibid.
164 pp.223–4, Art Gallaher, Jr. Plainville Fifteen Years Later, Columbia University
Press, New York, 1961.
165 pp.210–11, Paul W. Kingston, The Classless Society, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, 2000.
166 James Davis, ‘Achievement Variables and Class Cultures: Family, Schooling
and Job, and Forty-nine Dependent Variables in the G.S.S.’ pp.569–86,
American Sociological Review, 47, 1982.
167 pp.211–12, Kingston, op. cit.
168 pp.68, 79, 211, ibid.
169 Richard Centers, The Psychology of Social Classes, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1949.
170 M.R. Jackman and R.W. Jackman, Class Awareness in the United States,
University of California, Berkeley, 1983.
171 K.L. Schlozman and S. Verba, Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class and Political
Response, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1979.
172 The British seem to have had less difficulty in ‘correctly’ assigning themselves
or others to the class that sociologists suppose they belong to. G. Evans, ‘Class
conflict and Inequality’, in R. Jowell, et al., eds, International Social Attitudes:
The 10th British Social Attitudes Report, Dartmouth, Aldershot, 1993. See also
the discussion of this and other reports in pp.99–100, Devine, op. cit.
173 8% of blue collar workers identified themselves as working class in response
to an open question and 50% as middle class. p.91, Kingston, op. cit.
174 p.32, James Coleman and Lee Rainwater, Social Standing in America, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, London, 1978.
175 pp.90–4, Kingston, op. cit.
176 p.204, Halle, op. cit. In not one of dozens of verbatim quotes of his worker
informants and colleagues is the term ‘working class’ ever used.
177 Nonetheless nearly half the autoworkers surveyed in a new Detroit suburb in
the late 1950s were ready to identify themselves as working class and to dis-
tinguish themselves from non-manual workers. pp.80–90, Bennett Berger,
Working Class Suburb: A Study of Autoworkers in Suburbia, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1960.
178 p.379, Commons, op. cit.
179 The New York Working Men’s Party appears to have been a fair cross-section
of the population of the city, apart from lawyers, towards whom, like Halle’s
informants, it was particularly antagonistic. p.142, Walter Hugins, Jacksonian
Democracy and the Working Class: A Study of the New York Workingmen’s
Movement, 1829–1837, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1960.
180 see ‘Knights of Labor’ www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk.
181 pp.40–1, Erik Olin Wright, ed., The Debate on Classes, Verso, London, 1989.
182 Edward N. Woolf, Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and
What Can be Done About it, Twentieth Century Fund, New Press, New York,
1996.
183 pp.158–61, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2, Vintage, New
York, 1990.
184 Nelson Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory. Yale University Press:
New Haven, 1963.
185 pp.108–11, ibid.
186 Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York,
Charleston, Chicago and Los Angeles, Urbana, Ill, 1982.
187 p.9, ibid.
188 p.11, ibid.
189 pp.717–18, ibid.
190 pp.714–15, ibid.
191 p.728, ibid.
192 pp.728–30, He had in mind, among others, the wars between Gould and Fisk,
and Rockefeller and Morgan. ibid.
193 Despite the misleading title of E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The
Making of a National Upper Class, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadel-
phia, 1979. Philadelphia’s distinctiveness came out most strongly in his
Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of
Class Authority and Leadership, Free Press, New York, 1979. While noting
resemblances with the clans, schools, clubs and social registers of Boston, he
argued that the two cities were culturally ‘poles apart’, and contrasted Phila-
delphia’s ‘atomized’ upper class unfavourably with its cohesive Boston counter-
part. pp.32–50ff, ibid.
194 pp.207–29, Blumin, op. cit.
195 The muckraking contributions to Robert S. Allen, Our Sovereign State, Vanguard
Press, New York, 1949 suggest that in states where a single industry was over-
whelmingly important, some state governments were dominated by eco-
nomic interests for long periods, and political and economic elites thereby
covertly integrated. A kind of ruling class might therefore be said to have
emerged, but since these relationships were illegal, they were also unstable
and did not seek or obtain public recognition or acceptability.
196 As a result, West Point became anxious to demonstrate the openness of its
recruitment, and its contribution to the infrastructure of the civilian economy.
pp.106–24, Stephen E. Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point,

Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1966. The stereotype stuck nonetheless, as
numerous Hollywood westerns testify.
197 p.59, William Letwin, Law and Economic Policy in America: The Evolution of the
Sherman Antitrust Act, Random House, New York, 1965.
198 for the popular opposition to banks along the eastern seaboard in the late
1820s see pp.218–19, 276–8, 330, Sumner, op. cit. Hammond’s classic text is
more useful for legislative reaction to protests across the union rather than an
analysis of the protests themselves. Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in
America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1957. The distinctive way in which electoral pressures affected the
development of American banks also emerges in Richard H. Tilly, ‘Banking
Institutions in Historical and Comparative Perspective: Germany, Great
Britain and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century’,
pp.189–209, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 145/1, 1989.
199 pp.81–3, Letwin, op. cit.
200 p.85, ibid.
201 p.92, Letwin, op. cit.
202 The legal manoeuvres of corporations, the feeble enforcement efforts, and the
prevarications of the U.S. Supreme Court in the years immediately following
the passage of Sherman’s Act are described pp.113–14ff, Letwin, op. cit.
203 A.D. Neale and D.G. Goyder, The Anti-Trust Laws of the United States of America:
A Study of Competition Enforced by Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1980, 3rd edition.
204 A landmark report of ‘Nader’s Raiders’ claimed that the FTC had been unduly
influenced by the lawyers of auto companies, tire manufacturers and others,
but made no claims of improper links with company executives. Their main
criticisms were of the FTC’s lax and slow detection and enforcement pro-
cedures, the politicisation of its appointments, and its unwillingness to ask
Congress for powers and funds appropriate to its mission. Edward F. Cox,
Robert C. Fellmeth, John E. Schulz, The Nader Report on the Federal Trade
Commission, R.W. Baron New York, 1969. For critical reviews of various
‘capture’ theories see pp.52–66, 98–111, Michael D. Reagan, Regulation: The
Politics of Policy, Little Brown, Boston, 1987; pp.69–72, Larry N. Gerston,
Cynthia Fraleigh and Robert Schwab, The Deregulated Society, Brooks Cole,
Pacific Grove, 1988.
205 Ronald Brickman, Sheila Jasanoff, Thomas Ilgen, Controlling Chemicals: The
Politics of Regulation in Europe and the United States, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, N.Y., 1985.
206 In 1961 seven GE executives were jailed, and 23 received suspended sen-
tences. The firm was fined and subject of a large number of triple damage
compensation suits from those affected. Their story is told in John G. Fuller,
The Gentlemen Conspirators: The Story of the Price-Fixers in the Electrical Industry,
Grove Press, New York, 1962. Further sources on the case are discussed
pp.148–66, Dominick T. Armentano, Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a
Policy Failure, Holmes & Meier, New York, 1990.
207 p.150, Thomas J. Watson Jr and Peter Petre, Father, Son & Co. My Life at IBM
and Beyond, Bantam, New York, 1990.
208 p.150, ibid.
209 pp.3–28, Leverett S. Lyon et al., The National Recovery Administration, Brookings,
Washington, 1935.
210 pp.162, 212, 459, 528, ibid. For a review of the pros and cons for organized
labour see especially pp.527–31, ibid. For a review of the cons see Bernard
Bellush, The Failure of the NRA, Norton, New York, 1975.
211 pp.166–8, Lyon, op. cit. Membership of about one code authority in four was
determined by a trade association. p.206, ibid.
212 pp.260–9, ibid. There was a similar failure of compliance with the labour
provisions of the Act. pp.452–61, 528, ibid.
213 pp.180–90, 210, 227, 249–52, ibid.
214 ibid; for an account of Henry Ford’s refusal to collaborate with other auto-
mobile manufacturers, as well as the Federal Government pp.77–83, 94–5,
Sidney Fine, The Automobile under the Blue Eagle: Labor, Management, and
the Automobile Manufacturing Code, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor,
1963. Congressional opposition to the NRA was also gathering strength.
pp.705–15, Lyon, op. cit.
215 pp.181–206, Robert A. Kagan, Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001. The NRA does not appear
to have left any enduring legacy of association among businessmen. ‘Of the
800 trade associations formed between 1933 and 1936 only 275 were still
active by the time of American entry into the Second World War.’ p.296,
David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America,
Basic Books, New York, 1989.
216 pp.255–73, Kagan, op. cit. In 2001, Vogel was surprised to notice the emer-
gence of a number of regulatory policies in which European standards are
now stricter than their American counterparts. His notable examples were
GM crops, growth hormones for cattle, and animal protection. pp.5–7, David
Vogel, ‘The New Politics of Risk Regulation in Europe’, Discussion Paper
No. 3, Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation, London School of Eco-
nomics, 2001. One has still to see, however, whether this tougher regulatory
stance applies to large European as well as to large American companies.
217 pp.25–6, 81, Lynd & Lynd; p.81, West, op. cit.
218 p.89, G. William Domhoff, State Autonomy or Class Dominance?: Case Studies
on Policy Making in America, Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1996.
219 pp.91, 97, ibid.
220 p.167, Kingston, op. cit.
221 pp.342–4, E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste
in America, Vintage, New York, 1964.
222 pp.20, 124–5, David T. Stanley, Dean E. Mann, Jameson W. Doig, Men Who
Govern: A Biographical Profile of Federal Political Executives, The Brookings
Institution, Washington, D.C. 1967.
223 The proportion rose to 25% when all private schools are included, though
it then became uncertain whether we were still referring to an elite, since
‘all private schools’ included parochial Catholic schools and those of other
religious denominations.
224 pp.21–3, 126, ibid. pp.36, 132, W. Lloyd Warner et al., The American Federal
Executive, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1963. They did not try to identify
the contribution of private secondary schools which suggests that they did
not consider them significant.
225 His governmental elite included the president, senior advisers, the vice-
president and cabinet secretaries, deputy and assistant secretaries in all execu-
tive departments, congressional committee chairpersons, and ranking minority
members, House and Senate party leaders, justices of the Supreme Court,
members of the Federal Reserve Board, and Council of Economic Advisers.

In all, they totalled 227, to which were added 59 persons of comparable
authority in the armed services. p.12, ibid.
226 Between 57% and 67% of those in his four samples had attended college, and
of these between 32% and 16% had been undergraduates at Harvard, Yale or
Princeton, but the ‘the proportion of those attending these prestigious private
schools was declining.’ pp.168, 174, Granick, op. cit.
227 p.154, Thomas R. Dye, Who’s Running America? Institutional Leadership in the
United States, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976.
228 pp.133, 142, Thomas R. Dye, Who’s Running America? The Bush Restoration,
7th Edition Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 2002. His italics. The sample
size has increased from 5,778 to 7,314 in the seven editions of his work, but
his conclusions have changed hardly at all. p.10, ibid. Dye thought a stronger
case might be built on another of his findings – that about 30% of all American
elites in his surveys had come from an upper class family background – but he
was still not persuaded. p.151, ibid.
229 p.32, Donald Matthews, The Social Background of Political Decision-Makers,
Doubleday, New York, 1954.
230 pp.211–13. Dye, 1976, op. cit. However, he also pointed out that a quarter of
the governmental elite had previously held high corporate positions – a kind
of mobility for which there is no French counterpart – while ‘nearly 40% of
the corporate elites have held government jobs’, a much lower percentage
than that recorded in the studies of the French business elite cited above. ibid.
231 pp.137–45, 212, ibid.
232 pp.30, 136, Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, Stanley Rothman, American Elites,
Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996. Their sample of about 1,800 was
divided into 12 elites. Of the half whose fathers’ occupation was classified,
one-third were blue collar and two-thirds white. p.26, ibid.
233 Trow observed that he could ‘never remember hearing a California legislator
demand that a university increase access for the sons and daughters of
working class families’, and noted that while a recent OECD report treated
‘education and stratification’ and other familiar European categories, they
could not include any comparative data of this kind about Californian higher
education because ‘our statistics are simply not collected that way’. They were
more concerned with the fate of ethnic minorities. p.597, Trow, 1992, op. cit.
234 Tom Wolfe observed ‘Any fool sociologist could tell you there are only two
objectively detectable social classes in America: people above the bachelor’s
degree line – i.e. people who have graduated from four year colleges – and
people below it, who haven’t.’ quoted p.69, Epstein, op. cit.
235 pp.30–1, Matthews, op. cit.; pp.120–1, Roger H. Davidson and Walter J. Oleszek,
Congress and its Members, 9th ed., CQ Press, Washington, D.C., 2004. Con-
gressional Research Services Reports www.firstgov.gov. Dye recorded a similar
decline in the political elite as a whole during the Reagan presidency, and
even more so during Clinton’s. p.81, Dye, 2002, op. cit.
236 Of 1,000 CEOs surveyed in 1987, 11.7% were lawyers and 8.1% had practiced
as lawyers p.131, Tom Priest and R.A. Rothman, ‘Lawyers in Chief Executive
Positions: A Historical Analysis of Careers’, Work and Occupations, Vol. 12,
1985.
237 Tocqueville, of course, first suggested that since American businessmen had
few common ties with one another a new aristocracy was more likely to emerge
on the bench and bar.
238 The classic case is the opposition from lawyer-legislators in the state assembly
of New York to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the flag-
ship of the revived profession, when it attempted to obtain a charter in 1870.
p.45, E. George Martin, Causes and Conflicts: The Centennial History of the
Association of the Bar of the City of New York, 1870–1970, Houghton Mifflin,
Boston, 1970. Antagonisms and suspicions between lawyers in bar associa-
tions and lawyers in the legislature often surfaced in arguments over ‘inte-
grated’ (i.e. mandatory, official) bar associations. pp.73–4, Dayton David
McKean, The Integrated Bar, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1963.
239 Michael Useem, ‘The Social Organization of the American Business Elite and
Participation of Corporation Directors in the Governance of American
Institutions’, pp.553–72, American Sociological Review, Vol. 44, August, 1979.
240 pp.561–2, ibid. For some reason, ordinary members as well as directors or
board members were included in this last category.
241 p.192, Michael Useem, The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of
Business Political Activity in the U.S. and U.K., Oxford University Press, New
York, 1984.
242 pp.71–99, 107–9, 154, 250, G. William Domhoff, The Higher Circles: The
Governing Class in America, Random House, New York, 1970. He elaborated
and reiterated these arguments or variants of them in a succession of subse-
quent books.
243 a conclusion that is not based on a thorough study of all his works.
244 Henry Berger, Organized Labor and American Foreign Policy, pp.193–213, in
Irving Louis Horowitz et al., eds, The American Working Class: Prospects for the
1980s, Transaction Books, New Brunswick, N.J. 1979.
245 pp.194–5, ibid.
246 p.197, ibid.
247 Berger pointed out that the power base of the president, George Meany, was
among the building trades, and in all probability they were more sympathetic
to the official position of the AFL-CIO, which may therefore not have been
quite so unrepresentative as it appeared. ibid.
248 On social issues, Silk and Vogel observed, organized labour is highly sympa-
thetic to business, ‘more ally than adversary’ p.165, Silk and Vogel, 1976.
249 As noted earlier, Illinois miners in the 1890s and post World War I shared
many of the goals of their Scottish counterprarts but when it came to all-out
socialist collectivist measures, such as the nationalization of the industry,
…the American colliers were far more hesitant than their British counterparts’
and hence less likely to embrace a left-wing political party that advocated col-
lectivist goals.’ pp.232–4, Laslett, op. cit.
250 p.103, Davis, 1986, op. cit. While Halle’s worker-informants frequently criticized
the unfairness of the distribution of rewards in the United States, they had no
notion of an alternative political or economic system, and never expressed the
wish that capitalism itself should be replaced. pp.219, Halle, op. cit.
251 unless we assume that this ruling class is so powerful that it has determined
the opinions of the most Americans, while only Domhoff and a handful of
other independent-minded thinkers were able to escape their influence. There
seems no good reason to make such an assumption.
252 p.103, Davis, 1986, op. cit.
253 p.145, Fuerst, op. cit.
254 By contrast 42% of the British thought it was a government responsibility to
reduce income differences. p.25, Jowell et al., op. cit. One kind of government
action has, however, always been more popular among Americans – to increase
‘opportunities for young people to go to college’. see fn 144, supra.
255 p.302, Coleman and Rainwater, op. cit.
256 p.177, Jackman and Jackman, op. cit.
257 Gordon Marshall, ‘Some remarks on the study of working class consciousness,’
in D. Rose, ed., Social Stratification and Economic Change, Hutchinson, London,
1988; Davis, 1986, op. cit.; T.W. Smith, ‘Inequality and Welfare’ in R. Jowell,
British Social Attitudes: Special International Report, Gower, Aldershot, 1989.
258 p.290, Vogel, 1989, op. cit.
259 p.291, ibid.
260 This conversation may well, however, be an example of Polsby’s law that
‘famous sayings migrate to famous mouths.’ This remark has also been attrib-
uted to Lord Beaverbrook. p.72, Epstein, op. cit.
261 p.297, Halle, op. cit.
Chapter 7 Interim Conclusions from Three Societies

1 Mann came closest to doing so when he argued that ‘revolutionary potential is
greatest in situations of uneven economic and social development, when the
Capital-Labour contradiction may be reinforced by other social conflicts.’
However, he did not go on to compare the ‘unevenness’ or ‘contradictions’ of
capitalist societies, and instead located ‘the major determinants of contemporary
class consciousness outside the necessary structure of capitalism itself.’ He is
hardly, therefore, an alternative. Michael Mann, Consciousness and Action Among the
Western Working Class, Macmillan, London, 1973. As noted earlier, Wright’s
explanations of the differences in class formations in various industrial societies
are entirely political. pp.33–4, supra.
2 The declining interest in class analysis, and especially in materialist explanations
of class, is illustrated by many of the contributions to David J. Lee and Bryan
S. Turner, eds, Conflicts of Class: Debating Inequality in late Industrialism, Longmans,
London, 1996.
3 Aage B. Sorensen, ‘Toward a Sounder Basis of Class Theory’, pp.1523–58, American
Journal of Sociology, Vol. 105, No. 6, May 2000.
4 His fourth example ‘talented sportsmen’, seems to be of marginal importance in
this context.
5 Daniel J. Doyle, ‘Cocoa and Class in British Popular Press Advertising’, pp.11–39,
Thomas J. Edward Walker, ed., Illusive Identity: The Blurring of Working Class
Consciousness in Modern Western Culture, Lexington, Lanham, 2002.
6 pp.270–9, Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1957;
pp.224–30, Raymond Williams, The Sociology of Culture, University of Chicago,
Chicago, 1995.
7 Wright, for instance, found that ‘the marriage market’ undermined property and
class barriers. One might even cite Marx himself, since as Wright pointed out, he
thought that classes might well build on ‘traditional ascriptive forms of oppression
and inequality’ which would be destroyed by the market. p.541, Wright, op. cit.
Chapter 8 Re-examining the English Mystery

1 Albert White, Self-government at the King’s Command: A Study in the Beginnings
of English Democracy, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1933.
2 Sayles rather sniffily objected to the term ‘self-government at the king’s com-
mand’, and thought it may be ‘seriously misleading’, because what they did
was done ‘in obedience to instructions from the king, and nothing was done
in the sphere of local government by county courts, hundred courts, knights
of the shire or borough officials without his direct order or ultimate sanction.’
He failed, however, to document what he called the ‘rapidly increasing host
of civil servants’, or to provide any comparative measure of its magnitude, or
to explain how the king could sanction, or even know, what was being done
in his name by nobility, jurors, coroners, knights, free holders and chartered
bodies across the land. pp.437–8, G.O. Sayles, The Medieval Foundations of
Modern England, Perpetua, New York, 1961.
3 pp.97–9, Michael Briddick, ‘The Early Modern English State and the Question
of Differentiation, from 1550 to 1700’, pp.92–111, Comparative Studies in
Society & History, Vol. 38, No. 1, January 1996.
4 pp.111–26, M.L. Bush, The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis,
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984.
5 p.113, ibid.
6 So far as I can discover, no general histories of these events treat them as a
defining moment in the relationship between the state and civil society, but
see pp.232–59, J.H. Sacret, ‘The Restoration Government and Municipal Cor-
porations’, English Historical Review, Vol. XLV, April, 1930; Michael Landon,
The Triumph of the Lawyers: Their Role in English Politics 1678–1689, University
of Alabama, Alabama, 1970.
7 They are certainly not remembered or celebrated as a revolution. The ter-
centenary passed by unnoticed, apart from a perceptive, and tactful, speech to
both houses of Parliament by HM the Queen. This was the ninth item on the
main BBC Radio News that evening. It was printed in full in The Times, of the
following day, July 21st, 1988. However, since Scotland and Ireland were
centres of support for James II, this was plainly not a revolution that could be
celebrated throughout the British Isles.
8 They were the Earls of Shrewsbury, Devonshire and Danby, Lords Lumley
and Russell, Henry Compton, the suspended Bishop of London, and Henry
Sidney who wrote the letter, which is reprinted pp.313–14, Stuart E. Prall, The
Bloodless Revolution: England, 1688, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison,
WI, 1985.
9 a self-deception that is superbly explored in Howard Nenner, By Colour of Law:
Legal Culture and Constitutional Politics in England 1660–1689, University of
Chicago, Chicago, 1977.
10 pp.78–84, W.L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite, Macgibbon & Kee, London,
1965. More than two-thirds of Salisbury’s cabinet in 1895 was aristocratic,
as was that of Derby in 1852, though Grey’s, the cabinet that actually ini-
tiated the Great Reform Act in 1832, was the most aristocratic of all, with only
one commoner. p.210, Walter L. Arnstein, ‘The Survival of the Victorian
Aristocracy’, pp.203–57, Frederic Jaher, ed., The Rich, the Well Born, and the
Powerful: Elites and Upper Classes in History, University of Illinois Press, Urbana,
1973.
11 p.704, David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, Yale
University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1990.
12 They were, as Cannadine observed, unique among the aristocracies of Europe
in that they were never ‘the victims of civil war, armed invasion, proletarian
revolution or military defeat.’ p.703, ibid.
13 By the House of Lords Act 1999, which came into effect in 2002. Proposals for
further reform including the removal of the remaining hereditary peers, may
be found on www.dca.gov.uk/constitution/holref
14 More of a part than other aristocracies according to some observers. p.13,
Spring, op. cit.; pp.95–6, 261, Paul. H. Wilken, Entrepreneurship: A Comparative
and Historical Study, Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1979.
15 p.328, Guttsman, op. cit.
16 The best raw data to measure its role in this respect is to be found in Andrew
Roth with Janice Kerbey, Lord on the Board, Parliamentary Profiles, London,
1972. Roth guessed that ‘probably a third of Britain’s millionaires are in the
House of Lords’, and seemed more impressed by their cosmetic function for
companies. p.viii, ibid. Crewe’s recent study is more concerned with the
House of Lords corporate culture, and pays little attention to class. Emma
Crewe, Lords of Parliament: Manners, Rituals and Politics, Manchester University
17 pp.94–5, R.H. Tawney, Equality, Allen & Unwin, London, 1931.
18 p.54, Board of Education, The Public Schools and the General Education System,
1944.
19 About 22% of the Labour Government of 1945, 34% of that of 1951, 45%
leaders of business and industry, 62% of both judges and bishops, around
80% of the Conservative governments of 1951–1960, and 86% of ambas-
sadors, were from public schools, as were 31% of the ‘scientific directorate’,
40% of the ‘governors of culture and the arts’, and 56% of ‘government com-
mittee men’. pp.336–53, Guttsman, op. cit. He presented only the raw data
from his own, and other non-random samples he had found, which was not
always complete or commensurate. He also used the broadest definition of
public schools. see p.220 infra. The percentages are mine.
20 pp.84–9, John Fidler, The British Business Elite: Its Attitudes to Class, Status and
Power, Routledge, Kegan & Paul, London, 1981.
21 Leslie Hannah, ‘Education, Opportunity and Business Leadership’, A lecture to
celebrate the launch of the Foundation for Manufacturing and Industry, The
Guildhall, November 1993. mimeo. His figure was, however, not far below
that of Guttsman 30 years before. fn 19, supra.
22 The Headmasters’ Conference dates from a meeting convened by the head-
master of Uppingham in 1872. New members are elected by existing ones,
hence it is a co-opted elite of independent schools. In 1963 it had 196
members, and by 2006 some 250. p.3, Graham Kalton, The Public Schools: A
Factual Survey, Longmans Green, 1966; www.hmc.org.uk
23 p.237, McKibbin, op. cit.
24 Sakharov told how selected Komsomol members who had graduated from
university were lavishly wined and dined at the best restaurants, and enter-
tained in every way. They were then asked ‘Would you like to live like this
the rest of your life? If so, go to the VPSh, meaning the Higher Party School,
graduation from which guaranteed even the minimally gifted person, a
second secretaryship of a regional committee.’ pp.26–7, Sakharov, op. cit.
25 pp.44–5, Edward C. Mack, Public Schools and Public Opinion 1780–1860:
An Examination of the Relationship between Contemporary Ideas and the Evolution
of an English Institution, Methuen, London, 1938.
26 pp.100–9, Rupert Wilkinson, The Prefects: British Leadership and the Public
School Tradition, A Comparative Study of the Making of Rulers, Oxford University
Press, 1964. In his words the public school was ‘a citadel against the material-
ism and selfishness generated by the new capitalism of the Industrial

Revolution.’ pp.91–2, ibid.
27 see pp.67–73, Orwell, 1968, op. cit.; Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from
the Camp of Victory, Secker & Warburg London, 1961.
28 Their analysis was part of the National Child Development Study (NCDS).
This cohort was subject to five follow-up surveys between 1965 and 1991.
pp.86–8, 96, Anthony Heath and Sin Yi Cheung, ‘Education and Opportunity
in Britain’ pp.71–101, in Yossi Shavit and Walter Müller, eds, From School to
Work: A Comparative Study of Educational Qualifications and Occupational
Destinations, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997.
29 Sam Aaronovitch, The Ruling Class: A Study of British Finance Capital, Lawrence
& Wishart, London, 1961.
30 Tom Lupton and C. Shirley Wilson, ‘The Social Background of “Top Decision
Makers”’, pp.30–51, Manchester School, Jan 1959. Guttsman’s evidence sup-
ported them on many of these points, see especially columns 8 and 9, p.336,
op. cit.
31 Anthony Sampson, The Anatomy of Britain, 1962; Richard Whitley ‘Common-
alities and Connections Among Directors of Large Financial Institutions,
Sociological Review, Nov. 1973.
32 Scott showed that in 1904 there were a large number of interlocking directors
between financial institutions, but ‘these had produced no substantial links
with enterprises involved in manufacturing industry.’ There were, however,
closer links at local level. The national links increased by 1938, but by 1976
had fallen back again, so ‘a separation of City financial interests and other
business interests was still apparent.’ His measures for 1988 were ‘very similar
to those found for 1976’, and revealed ‘a structural separation between two
network positions, a dominant position occupied by the large financial insti-
tutions and a subordinate position occupied by the industrial and retailing
concerns.’ pp.163–8, John Scott, ‘Transformations in the British Economic
Elite’, pp.155–73, in Dogan, ed., op. cit.
33 pp.169–92, Ken Roberts, Class in Modern Britain, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2001.
34 ‘The Rich List’ www.timesonline.co.uk
35 p.37, James B. Christoph, ‘Higher Civil Servants and the Politics of
Consensualism in Great Britain’, in Mattei Dogan, ed., The Mandarins of
Western Europe: The Political Role of Top Civil Servants, Wiley, New York, 1975.
36 pp.188–92, Dennis Kavanagh and David Richards, ‘Prime Ministers, Ministers
and Civil Servants in Britain’, pp.175–96, Dogan, 2003, op. cit.
37 As noted above, Dye found that a quarter of the American governmental elite
had previously held high corporate positions, and that ‘nearly 40% of the cor-
porate elites have held government jobs.’ fn 228, p.386, supra; in 1967 Stanley
et al. found that over the five administrations from Franklin Roosevelt to
Lyndon Johnson 24% had come from business, though 64% had come from
private employment of all kinds. Lawyers were the other largest group. p.34,
Stanley, Mann & Doig, op. cit.
38 p.50, Christoph, op. cit.
39 p.176, Kavanagh & Richards, op. cit. They pointed out that in the past
50 years, only two former civil servants had achieved high political office, one
being Harold Wilson who was a wartime civil servant. ibid.
40 p.174, Granick, op. cit.
41 pp.90, 187, Fidler, op. cit.
42 pp.218–26, ibid.
43 They felt Labour was closer to unions, and the Conservatives to the City,
while they themselves were unloved by either party. However, 28% of them
made donations to the Conservative Party, and a further 29% also gave to
various propaganda organizations in favour of free enterprise. p.228, ibid.
44 Fulcher’s comparison of the organization of Swedish and British employers
strongly corroborated this point, since one of its major themes was the ‘weak-
ness of national employer organization in Britain.’ He attributed the failure of
corporatist policies in Britain in the 1970s to the fact that ‘employer organiza-
tions have lacked the organizational capacity to perform such a role.’
pp.309ff, Fulcher, op. cit.
45 pp.231–4, Fidler, op. cit. This is sharply at odds with the impression created by
Useem, though his arguments may reasonably be ignored since he declined to
confront, or even mention, Fidler’s much more convincing data. pp.187–92,
Useem, op. cit.
46 pp.28–9. Frans N. Stokman and Frans W. Wasseur, ‘National Networks in
1976; A Structural Comparison, pp.20–44, in Frans N. Stokman, Rolf Ziegler
and John Scott, Networks of Corporate Power: A Comparative Analysis of Ten
Countries, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1985.
47 pp.268–9, 276, Rolf Ziegler, ‘Conclusion’, in Stokman et al., op. cit. One might
add that a much higher degree of clustering and centralization were found in
the small countries in the study, such as Austria, Belgium and Finland, than
in Britain, France or the United States.
48 Guttsman was persuaded that British elites were interconnected, that what he
called ‘pluralists of power’ were common, and he presented sociograms, an
early form of network analysis, to illustrate their ‘peregrinations’. However most
of these peregrinations were through advisory committees of one sort or ano-
ther, and for some reason, he neglected to provide a sociogram of the economic
elite. He did not present any comparative evidence. pp.359–67, Guttsman,
op. cit.
49 Oliver Macdonagh, Early Victorian Government, 1830–1870, Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, London, 1977.
50 Stephen Wilks, In the Public Interest: Competition Policy and the Monopolies and
Mergers Commission, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999.
51 p.149, ibid.
52 pp.110, 149, 164, ibid.
53 David Vogel, National Styles of Regulation: Environmental Protection in Britain
and the United States, Cornell, Ithaca, 1986. He found a similar contrast in the
regulation of occupational health and safety, consumer protection and
financial markets. pp.195–225, ibid.
54 Margaret B.W. Graham, ‘R&D and Competition in England and the United
States: The Case of the Aluminum Dirigible,’ pp.261–85, Business History
Review, 62, Summer, 1988.
55 John Hendry, Innovating for Failure: Government Policy and the Early British
Computer Industry, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
56 pp.243–4, David Coates, ed., Industrial Policy in Britain, Macmillan, London
1996. Policies towards agriculture and the military were excluded from this
conclusion.
57 F.M.L. Thompson perceptively observed that ‘Only once in the nineteenth
century was there a possibility of an antielite, with a class basis, and that was
when the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League were poised for a general
attack on the aristocratic monopoly. Even then, the width of the objectives in
administrative, political and social reconstruction probably vastly exceeded

the width of support, so that the rapid collapse after 1846 of any prospect of a
middle class elite peddling a general bourgeois ethic comes as little surprise.’
p.37, F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Britain’ pp.22–44, in Spring, op. cit.
58 pp.29–30, 148, R.H. Gretton, The English Middle Class, Bell, London, 1919.
59 There were 48 of them. Henry Havard, and Marius Vachon, Les Manufactures
Nationales: Les Gobelins, la Savonnerie, Sévres, Beauvais, Paris, 1889; for the
foundry at Indret http://boisseau, and the drapery at Montolieu www.manu-
facture.nl/Frans/histoire
60 In 1791, when the Constituent Assembly sought to liquidate these offices, it
received 45,000 claims for compensation. p.309, Doyle, op. cit.
61 The best general account is William Hyde Price, The English Patents of Monopoly,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1913.
62 Her words were ‘Since I was queen, yet did I never put my pen to any grant
but upon pretext and semblance made me, that it was for the good and avail
of my people generally, though a private profit to some of my ancient ser-
vants, who have deserved well; but that my grants shall be made grievances to
my people, and oppressions, to be privileged under color of our patents, our
princely dignity shall not suffer it … and those varlets, lewd persons, abusers
of my bounty, shall know I will not suffer it.’ p.161, ibid.
63 Elizabeth’s speech of 1601, and James I’s Act of 1624 are reprinted pp.325,
337, George Burton Adams and H. Morse Stephens, Select Documents of English
Constitutional History, Macmillan, New York, 1908. Root suggested that
Elizabeth made every effort to avoid favouring one individual or group, where
the Stuarts made no secret of their personal favourites. p.351, Hilton L. Root,
‘The Redistributive Role of Government: Economic Regulation in Old Régime
France and England’, pp.338–69, Comparative Studies in Society & History,
Vol. 33, No. 2, April 1991.
64 For the former, including the one or two that survived the interregnum,
see pp.131–44, and for the latter pp.144–71, Margaret James, Social Problems
and Policy during the Puritan Revolution, 1640–1660, Routledge, London,
1930.
65 p.53, Robert H. George, ‘The Charters Granted to English Parliamentary
Corporations in 1688’, pp.47–56, English Historical Review, Vol. lv, January,
1940; p.124, Landon, op. cit.
66 pp.110–11, ibid.
67 The trial, the circumstances leading to it, the legal merits of the arguments are
examined pp.28–54, Jennifer Levin, The Charter Controversy in the City of
London 1660–1688, Athlone, London, 1969.
68 pp.353–8, Sir George Clark, A History of the Royal College of Physicians of
London, Vol. 1, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964; pp.120–4, Cecil Wall,
H. Charles Cameron and E. Ashworth Underwood, A History of the Worshipful
Society of Apothecaries of London, Vol. 1, 1617–1815, London, Oxford
University Press, 1963. However, several provincial cities continued the strug-
gle after the City of London’s defeat. pp.124–42, Landon, op. cit.
69 For the extensive purges in the Society of Apothecaries following the surren-
der of their charter pp.101–5, 336–9, Wall et al., op. cit.
70 For the new charter proposed for the Barber-Surgeons see p.96, Jessie Dobson
and R. Milnes Walker, The Barbers and Barber-Surgeons of London, Blackwell,
Oxford, 1979. Provisions of several other new charters are examined, pp.47–53,
George, 1940, op. cit.
71 For James II’s moves against the universities pp.183–203, David Ogg, England
in the Reigns of James II and William III, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955;
pp.87–91, Levin, op. cit. The fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford refused to
elect the royal nominee as their president in 1687, and further sanctions were
therefore imposed on them.
72 pp.438–43, Burrage, 2006, op. cit.
73 p.48, George, 1940, op. cit.
74 p.228, Davis, 1961, op. cit.
75 p.93, Levin, op. cit.
76 2 W&M c8 pp.171–3, The Statutes of the Realm, Vol. 6, Printed by Command
of His Majesty George III, London, 1819; p.58, Levin; pp.448–50, 469, Adams
and Stephens, ed., op. cit.
77 pp.104–9, 175–82, 291–2, Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I
and the Early Stuarts: 1590–1640, Longman, London, 1972.
78 pp.183–4, Geoffrey Millerson, The Qualifying Associations, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, London, 1964.
79 The way English solicitors realized each of these goals is traced in Michael
Burrage, ‘From A Gentleman’s To A Public Profession: status and politics in
the history of English solicitors’, pp.45–75, International Journal of the Legal
Profession, Vol. 3, No. 1/2, March 1996.
80 Northcote had earlier been Gladstone’s private secretary. Trevelyan was head
of the Treasury.
81 The analogy with the ancient professions seems to have been commonplace
among civil servants themselves at the time. See the remarks from their
Gazette in 1853 quoted p.98, A.P. Donajgrodzki, The Home Office, 1822–1848,
Oxford University Press, 1972.
82 Their professional association retains its original name, the First Division
Association, see its website www.fda.org.uk
83 for a full explanation and documentation of this hostility until the modest
beginnings of formal training in 1963 see pp.111–54, Geoffrey K. Fry,
Statesmen in Disguise. The changing role of the Administrative Class of the
British Home Civil Service, 1853–1966, Macmillan, London, 1969. Learning
by doing has been noted by many observers p.47, Frank Dunnill, The
Civil Service: Some Human Aspects, Allen & Unwin, London, 1956; p.37,
Hugh Heclo and Aaron Wildavsky, The Private Government of Public
Money: Community and Policy Inside British Politics, Macmillan, London,
1974.
84 As in every profession, collegial trust appears to have been a primary ethical
ideal. The ‘one inescapable theme in virtually every interview we conducted
is the vital importance participants place on personal trust for each other’
p.15ff, Heclo and Wildavsky, op. cit.
85 for references and a discussion of this notion p.178, Kavanagh & Richards,
op. cit.
86 Like the ancient professions, they also resisted resort to external legal inter-
vention to resolve internal disputes about employment conditions.
87 In 1961 the Plowden Committee found that they were so concerned with
policy advice that they did not have much time for management. In 1968 the
Fulton Committee observed that they ‘tended to think of themselves as policy
advisers to the people above them rather than as managers of the administra-
tive machine below them.’ both quoted p.195, Gavin Drewry and Tony
Butcher, The Civil Service Today, Blackwell, Oxford, 1988.
88 pp.45–9, Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, HarperCollins, London,

1993.
89 Apart from the examinations, from which there were many exemptions, the
Northcote-Trevelyan reforms do not appear to have been a decisive transition
towards bureaucracy as Weber defined it. Stephen’s account of the ‘little com-
monwealth’ and ‘pure democracy’ of the Treasury in 1848 leaves the impres-
sion that they might be better described as a transition from a rather lax of
gentlemen’s club to one with somewhat more stringent admission require-
ments. p.45, Henry Parris, Constitutional Bureaucracy: The Development of British
Central Administration Since the 18th Century, Allen & Unwin, London, 1969.
90 For sterotypes of the backgrounds, personality types and behaviour of each
class see pp.50ff, Dunnill, op. cit. For a full listing, along with their separate
career paths and representative associations pp.185–90, Vol. 1, pp.409–99,
Vol. 4, Factual, Statistical and Explanatory Papers, Committee under the
Chairmanship of Lord Fulton, The Civil Service Her Majesty’s Stationery Office,
London, 1968.
91 For details see the website of the British Computer Society www. bcs.org.uk.
p.618, Burrage, 2006, op. cit. Another example is the Chartered Institute of
Personnel and Development. Its royal charter, granted in 2000, and its code
of ethics, are reproduced on its website www.cipd.co.uk
92 In the concluding chapter of the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon for
which see http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-bru-
maire/index.htm
93 For an example of the former comparison pp.32–4, Robert Robson, The
Attorney in Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, London,
1959, and for many of the latter J. Stuart Anderson, Lawyers and the Making of
English Land Law, 1832–1940, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992.
94 Grant Jordan, Engineers and Professional Self-Regulation: From the Finniston
Committee to the Engineering Council, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992.
95 Ad hoc cross-professional comparisons are to be found in the histories of most
professions. They were permanently institutionalized in the pay review bodies
such as those of the National Board of Prices and Incomes in the late 1960s.
For some information of current practices see www.ome.uk.com/review
96 George V. Taylor, ‘Noncapitalist wealth and the Origins of the French
Revolution’, American Historical Review, Vol. lxxii, 1967.
97 pp.62–4, 99–102, 134, Alfred Cobban, Aspects of the French Revolution, Paladin,
St. Albans, 1971.
98 For an account of one exceptionally durable one, the Worsted Committee of
Yorkshire, formed in the 1770s and still in existence in 1965, see pp.405–37,
Herbert Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries: From Earliest
Times to the Industrial Revolution, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965. A 1997 study
left the impression that trade associations in Britain were numerous but over-
lapping, competitive and very poorly organized by comparison with their
German counterparts, which performed many more functions and had much
greater authority over their members. R.J. Bennett, ed., Trade Associations in
Britain and Germany: Responding to Internationalisation and the EU, Anglo-
German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society, London, 1997.
99 In his overall measure of the backgrounds of the ‘rising new men’ of the polit-
ical elite over the years 1868–1955, Guttsman found 25 in the general category,
‘banking, commerce, entrepreneurs and managers’, versus 78 professionals.
There were also 29 union officials, 2 workers, and 11 ‘rentiers’. p.169,
Guttsman, op. cit. Since the new elite was dominated by professionals, it is
perhaps not surprising that it preserved the titles of the old. Despite their col-
legial ethic, all professions seem to relish titles.
100 along with some of the landed gentry. pp.10, 17, 67, 105, 242, 315, pp.97,
239, 314 Richard H. Trainor, Black Country Elites: The Exercise of Authority in an
Industrialized Area, 1830–1900, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. Comparing his
work with more economically diverse regional capitals he suggested ‘manu-
facturers were highly influential’ but did not dominate local elites ‘except in
the starkest factory or mining towns.’ p.379, ibid.
101 Some of these, Hoggart pointed out, ‘may, if they are known as individuals,
escape being defined as one of “Them”’. A general practitioner, for instance,
‘if he wins his way by his devotion to his patients, is not, as a general prac-
titioner, one of “Them”’, but ‘he and his wife as social beings are.’ A parson
‘may or may not be regarded as one of “Them”, according to his behaviour.’
pp.72–3, op. cit.
102 E.P. Thompson, op. cit.
103 His final example, from 1549, was the last such general legislation until the
Combination Law of 1799. p.10, Godfrey I.H. Lloyd, The Cutlery Trades: An
Historical Essay in the Economics of Small-Scale Production, Longmans, London,
1913.
104 pp.185, 224, George Unwin, The Guilds and Companies of London, Cass, London,
1963 (1st edition 1908).
105 pp.217, 220, ibid.
106 p.228, ibid.
107 p.220, ibid.
108 Burrage and Corry, op. cit.
109 For a brief overview of the protests in eight companies, pp.193–240, James,
op. cit. In all, they involved four livery companies, and ten industrial guilds.
For a more detailed account of the protests in one livery company pp.112–22,
Thomas Girtin, The Golden Ram: A Narrative History of the Clothworkers’ Com-
pany, 1528–1958, London, 1958.
110 p.339, Unwin, op. cit.
111 Lloyd, op. cit.
112 p.79, ibid. though it is not on Levin’s list pp.109–12, Levin, op. cit.
113 pp.115–21, ibid.
114 By 1786, there were also 52 friendly societies not based on any particular
trade, pp.239–42, ibid.
115 pp.123–4, ibid.
116 p.247, ibid.
117 p.124, ibid.
118 p.253, ibid.
119 p.263, ibid.
120 pp.282–3, ibid.
121 The Nottinghamshire framework knitters first looked for protection to the
Needlemakers’ Company in London, presumably because some of them had
ties with it. Being disappointed by the Company’s efforts, they formed the
Stockingmakers’ Association, which survived for some three years. pp.61–77,
William Felkin, A History of Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures,
Strange, London, 1867. Rule reported combinations among the journeymen
of the Masons and Painter Stainers Company in London in 1750 seeking to
preserve the exclusiveness of their trades in defiance of their masters p.189,
Rule, op. cit. The rules of the union of calico printers in Lancashire bore a
marked resemblance to those of the City of London Company, and we may
reasonably infer direct continuity. p.295, H.A. Turner, Trade Union Growth,
Structure and Policy, Allen & Unwin, London, 1962. The earliest trade society
among London compositors developed out of an association of journeymen
belonging to the decrepit Stationers’ Company. pp.1–13, A.E. Musson, The
Typographical Association: Origins and History up to 1949, Oxford Univesity
Press, London, 1954.
122 p.168, Rule, op. cit.
123 pp.152–6, ibid.
124 pp.156–8, ibid.
125 p.164, ibid.
126 For a critical evaluation of their argument, see pp.149–51, Rule, op. cit.
127 Lujo von Brentano, On the History and Development of Guilds and the Origin
of Trade Unions, Trubner, London, 1870. Trade unions, in his view, did not
develop directly out of the guilds, but were on the contrary a response to their
breakdown, and attempted to retrieve the old order or create a new one
modelled on the old.
128 Apart from the works of Turner, Lloyd and Rule already cited, see R.A. Leeson,
Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries from Craft Fellowship to Trade Unionism,
Allen & Unwin, London, 1979; C.R. Dobson, Masters and Journeymen: A Pre-
history of Industrial Relations 1717–1800, Croom Helm, London, 1980; R. Price,
Masters, Unions and Men, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, as well
as many histories of particular trades, such as pp.17–60, Ted Brake, Men of Good
Character: A History of the National Union of Sheet Metal Workers, Coppersmiths,
Heating and Domestic Engineers, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1985.
129 Hundreds of these are reproduced in John Gorman, Banner Bright, Allen Lane,
London, 1973. A few of them, temporarily at least, included Marx and Lenin,
a fair reflection perhaps of the influence of Marxist or Soviet inspired social-
ism on the British labour movement.
130 T.K. Derry, ‘The Repeal of the Apprenticeship Clauses of the Statute of
Apprentices’, pp.67–87, Economic History Review, III, 1931–1932. The following
paragraphs are entirely indebted to this essay, though for another account
that does not differ in essentials pp.63–7, Brake, op. cit.
131 p.76, op. cit.
132 Tilly thought that such movements began at a later date, and gave credit to
middle class reformers that properly belongs to working men. Charles Tilly,
‘Britain Creates the Social Movement’, pp.21–51, James E. Cronin and
Jonathan Schneer, eds, Social Conflict and the Political Order in Modern Britain,
Croom Helm, London, 1982.
133 Thompson, however, mentioned it en passant but is preoccupied with other
emerging forms of protest and suffering that he thought were more modern.
Why he did not feature it as a nationally organized class movement, which by
his standards it certainly was, and as one of the great innovative achieve-
ments of the English working class, is puzzling. It would not, however, have
fitted well into his implicit timetable of the ‘making of the English working
class’. p.253, Thompson, 1965, op. cit.
134 p.86, Derry, op. cit.
135 p.127, Dobson; see also p.177, Rule, op. cit.
136 Clive Behagg, ‘Controlling the Product: Work, Time, and the Early Industrial
Workforce in Britain, 1800–1850, pp.41–58, Gary Cross, ed., Worktime and
Industrialization: An International History, Temple University Press, Philadelphia,

1988.
137 p.46, ibid.
138 p.268, Lloyd, op. cit.
139 Turner evidently found it difficult to grasp the content of their ‘skill’.
pp.164–5, Turner, H.A. op. cit.
140 pp.66–72, 209, Judith Vichniac, The Management of Labor: The British and
French Iron and Steel Trade Industries, 1860–1918, JAI, Greenwich, 1990; and
Holt, op. cit.
141 Edward H. Lorenz, ‘Two Patterns of Development: The Labour Process in the
British and French Shipbuilding Industries 1880–1930’, pp.599–630, Journal of
Economic History, 1984.
142 pp.229, 234, Duncan Gallie, In Search of the New Working Class: Automation
and Social Integration within the Capitalist Enterprise, Cambridge University
143 Pierre Dubois, ‘Workers Control over the Organization of Work: French and
English Maintenance Workers in Mass Production Industry’, pp.347–60,
Organization Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1981.
144 Dwight Rayton, Shop Floor Democracy in Action: A Personal Account of the Coventry
Gang System, Industrial Common Ownership Movement, London, 1992.
145 Many of his comments suggest that the gangs were formed by skilled crafts-
men, but he gave no breakdown of their skill composition, or of their links
with the unions, other than to say they were loyal members.
146 Wayne Lewchuk, American Technology and the British Vehicle Industry,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. It was further corroborated by
a case study of a metal-working factory in the same area, even though its
authors were persuaded it was ‘atypical’. Hugh Scullion and P.K. Edwards,
‘Craft Unionism, Job Controls and Management Strategy: Premier Metals,
1955–1980’, in M. Terry and P.K. Edwards, eds, Shopfloor Politics and Job
Controls: The Post-War Engineering Industry, Blackwell, Oxford, 1988.
147 British automobile workers seldom resisted new production technology per se.
‘In our research’, he noted, ‘we have uncovered very few cases of labour resist-
ing the introduction of new production techniques in the motor industry.’
Sometimes, of course, they entailed the introduction of new work relation-
ships. pp.73, 101, 131, 141, ibid.
148 p.183, ibid.
149 pp.503, 511, 517, Leon Grunberg, ‘Workplace Relations in the Economic
Crisis: A Comparison of a British and French Automobile Plant’, pp.503–29,
Sociology, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1986.
150 pp.627–9 Leon Grunberg, ‘The Effects of the Social Relations of Production on
Productivity and Workers’ Safety: an ignored set of relationships’, pp.621–34,
International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1983. The French plant
was, however, larger, had more advanced facilities and machinery, and a
higher proportion of immigrant workers.
151 S.R. Timperley, ‘A Study of a Self-Governing Work Group’, pp.259–80,
Sociological Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1970.
152 p.269, ibid.
153 Skilled are ‘craftsmen, foremen and kindred workers’. Unskilled are ‘operatives
and kindred workers’ p.139, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics,
1975, op. cit.; p.417, Statistical Abstract of the United States 1984; p.413, 1995;
p.395, 2003, Washington, D.C.
154 Table 19, Census 1961, HMSO 1966; Table 29, Census 1971, Economic Activity
HMSO, 1975; Table 17, p.548, Economic Activity, Great Britain, Census 1981,
HMSO, 1984; p.535, Census 1991, OPCS and Reg-Gen Scotland, HMSO, 1994,
Table S132, p.40, Census 2001, National Report for England and Wales, Pt. 2.
TSO, London, 2002. Foremen have been included with skilled workers to try
and preserve comparability with the U.S.
155 Roughly comparable, that is, if qualifiés and non-qualifiés may be taken as
equivalent to skilled and non-skilled Qualifiés et non-qualifiés Population Active
Emploi et Chomage Depuis Trente Ans Les Collections de l’insée, 123D, Institut
National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques, Nov 1987.
156 pp.92–7, David Marsden, A Theory of Employment Systems: Micro-Foundations of
Societal Diversity, Oxford University Press, PLACE, 1999. In the U.S. they are
collected by grades on job ladders, in Japan by rank, age or length of service,
and in France by a mix of the knowledge required, autonomy, responsibility
and complexity of a job.
157 This point is repeatedly made by Perkin. ‘Even the most class conscious of
industrial disputes’, he observed, had a ‘professional dimension to them.’
p.466, Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880,
Routledge, London, 1989.
158 H.J. Habakkuk, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The
Search for Labour-Saving Inventions, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, 1962;
S.N. Broadberry, The Productivity Race: British Manufacturing in International
Perspective, 1850–1990, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.
159 He concluded ‘that purposive collective association (particularly of labour) is
not a by-product of industrial capitalism – and thus … an artificial or con-
trived imposition on a supposed state of natural competitiveness – but the
result of a separate and continuing impulse to associate, the expression of
which was only interrupted and modified by the economic revolution.’ p.295,
Turner, op. cit.
160 pp.317–26, Truant, op. cit.
161 Tom Mann quoted p.10, Richard Hyman, The Workers’ Union, Clarendon
162 Hyman pointed out that although the new unions began their organizing
campaigns in the late 1880s, they ‘only came into their own’ and secured sub-
stantial membership in mass production and hitherto weakly-organized
industries in the years preceding World War I. pp.259–61, Richard Hyman,
‘Mass organization and Militancy in Britain; Contrasts and Continuities’
pp.250–65, Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Han-Gerhard Husung, ed., The
Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880–1914, Allen
& Unwin, London, 1985.
163 It has often been suggested that it was precisely because the Transport &
General, under the shrewd leadership of Ernest Bevin, created an internal
structure that provided a large degree of autonomy for the ‘trade groups’
within it, even though it was recruiting semi and unskilled workers, that it
became the largest union in the country after the First World War. pp.5–8,
H.A. Clegg, General Union: A Study of the National Union of General and
Municipal Workers, Blackwell, Oxford, 1954. For another example Sir William
Richardson, A Union of Many Trades: The History of USDAW (the Union of
Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers), USDAW, Manchester, 1979.
164 Arthur Marsh and Victoria Ryan, Historical Directory of Trade Unions, 3 vols,
Gower, London, 1982, 1983, 1987.
165 Edelstein and Warner, fn 140, p.381, supra.

166 The strange notion that workers are incapable of displaying any class solidar-
ity unless they abandoned their trade solidarity seems to be deeply embedded
in labour history, and along with it a decided prejudice against craft unions.
For a rare exception see Antoine Joseph, Skilled Workers’ Solidarity: The American
Experience in Comparative Perspective, Garland, New York, 2000. On the premise
that ‘workers are organized as a class whenever they are organized as workers’
he argued that the American Federation of Labor in the Gilded Age was a class
organization pp.65, 173–4, ibid.
167 Marsh & Ryan, op. cit.
168 Millerson, op. cit.; Nigel Harris, Professional Codes of Conduct in the United
Kingdom: A Directory, Mansell, London, 1989; Patricia Millard, ed., Associations
and Professional Bodies of the United Kingdom: An Alphabetical and Subject Class-
ified Guide to over 3600 Organisations, Gale Research International, New York,
1994, 13th ed., or perhaps the list of chapters granted by the Privy Council
since 1231 on www.privy-council.org.uk <lhttp://www.privy-council.org.uk>
169 Michael Burrage, ‘School versus Practice-based education: a comparison of
three modern societies’ in Sheldon Rothblatt and Björn Wittrock, eds, The
European and American University since 1800, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1992.
170 for a vivid account of the guild roots of their preference pp.95–100, Peter
Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life
1660–1730, Methuen, London, 1989.
171 pp.225, 229, Harold Perkin, ‘The Recruitment of Elites in British Society Since
1800’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 12, No. 2 Winter, 1978.
172 pp.303–4fn, Erickson and Goldthorpe, op. cit.; pp.20, 26, 37, Yossi Shavit and
Walter Müller, ‘The Institutional Embeddedness of the Stratification Process: a
comparative study of the qualifications and occupations in thirteen countries’,
pp.1–48, Shavit & Müller, op. cit. Their data referred, however, to the 1970s.
173 Kynaston noted ‘an attitude of suspicion’ towards graduates in the City of
London, at least until recent times see pp.423, 787–9, David Kynaston,
The City of London, Volume 4: A Club No More, 1945–2000, Chatto & Windus,
London, 2001. Beevor noticed it in the British army pp.102–3, Anthony Beevor,
Inside the British Army, Corgi, London, 1993.
174 At least one-third of the heirs of the ‘founder-entrepreneurs’ of notable British
firms between 1880–1980 were trained by apprenticeship. Two-thirds of the
founders had themselves been trained in this way. pp.38–9, Christine Shaw,
Patterns of Success: Twentieth Century Entrepreneurs in the Dictionary of Business
Biography, Discussion Paper No. 114, Centre of Economic Performance,
London School of Economics, 1993. Copeman’s analysis of the careers of
90 business leaders in 1966 found that 19 had served a craft apprenticeship,
another 18 had served practice-based professional articles, 32 had begun as
messenger or office boys, clerks or undefined trainees and assistants, usually
at the age of 15 or 16. Only 23 had university degrees. p.21, George Copeman,
The Chief Executive and Business Growth: A Comparison of the United States,
Britain and Germany, Leviathan House, London, 1971.
175 p.209, British Labour Statistics Yearbook, 1969, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office,
London, 1971. In absolute numbers, 1966 was the peak year for apprentices
and 1968 for ‘apprentices plus other trainees’. p.25, Howard F. Gospel, The
Decline of Apprenticeship Training in Britain, Discussion Paper No. 189, Centre
for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, 1994.
176 see especially pp.428–38, Shadwell, op. cit.; P.L. Robertson, Technical Educa-
tion in the British Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Industry, 1863–1914,
Economic History Review, 27, 1974; Robert J. Bennett, Howard Glennerster and
D. Nevison, Learning Should Pay, BP Educational Services, Poole, 1992.
177 All these points cannot be documented here. However, the least well-known,
the ‘problem’ of early leaving pre- and post-World War II, was examined in
Early Leaving: A Report of the Central Council for Education (England). Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1954. It included data on those at
grammar and other schools who had the academic ability to continue to
A-levels and therefore to university, but preferred to enter a professional or
manual apprenticeships. pp.50–5, ibid.
178 One reason for thinking that the grandes écoles have been significant agents of
class formation in France is that much of the training they provide is in fact
practice-based and practitioner-controlled.
179 p.13, John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez Faire, Leonard & Virginia
Woolf, London, 1927. He traced its origins in France to the late seventeenth,
or more probably, mid-eighteenth century. pp.18–19, ibid.
180 which necessarily means parting company with Keynes’ exclusively intellec-
tual account of the origins of the doctrine.
181 pp.46–8, Arthur J. Taylor, Laissez-Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth
Century Britain, Macmillan, London, 1972.
182 pp.85, 87, Derry, op. cit.
183 The provisions of both acts are analysed in C.G. Hanson, Trade Unions: A Century
of Privilege? Occasional Paper, 38, Institute of Economic Affairs, London, 1973.
184 p.16, ibid.
185 Sidney Webb had signed the majority report, and with his wife later described
the act as giving ‘an extraordinary and unlimited immunity, however great may
be the damage caused, and however unwarranted the act, which most lawyers,
as well as employers, regard as nothing less than monstrous.’ p.17, ibid.
186 for instance, the Trade Disputes Act of 1927 outlawed political strikes, but was
repealed in 1946. Similarly, the House of Lords decision in Rookes v. Barnard
in 1965, which allowed employers to sue for intimidation was reversed by the
Trade Disputes Act of the same year. p.18, ibid.
187 But then he would doubtless have replied that the inns of court were not
created by an act of Parliament.
188 Hanson shows ‘that in the late 19th and early 20th century the trade unions
had extraordinary success in persuading parliament to legislate in their favour
contrary to advice it received.’ p.8, op. cit.
189 p.90, Tom Sharpe, ‘British Competition Policy in Perspective’, Oxford Review of
Economic Policy, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1985.
Chapter 9 Testing the Puzzle-solving Capacity of the

Argument
1 George Eliot used the term ‘intellectuals’ as early as 1852. However, it is clear
that she did not have precise collective referents, and she was herself a decidedly
‘unattached’ intellectual. Sheldon Rothblatt, ‘George Eliot as a Type of European
Intellectual’, pp.47–65, History of European Ideas, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1986.
2 pp.196, 208, 214, Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England 1860–1870, trans by Edward
Hyams, Thames & Hudson, London, 1957.
3 p.285, N.G. Annan, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, pp.243–87, in J.H. Plumb, ed.,
Studies in Social History, Longmans Green, London, 1955.
4 pp.199–226, Collini, op. cit.
5 p.237, T.W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England,
6 p.210, Collini, op. cit.
7 pp.212–13, ibid. Aron anticipated several of these points in his wider cross-soci-
etal comparison 40 years earlier, which remains the best comparative analysis of
intellectuals to date. He placed Britain between France, the ‘paradise’ of intellec-
tuals, and the United States, which he thought was their ‘hell’. pp.203–35,
Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, Secker & Warburg, London, 1957.
8 English intellectuals were, Aron observed, ‘no less attached to parliamentary
institutions than conservatives.’ p.229, ibid.
9 A point which Charle gave some emphasis. In England ‘Il n’existe pas …de vérita-
ble académie susceptible de fixer une norme, d’attribuer des récompenses à la literature
vivante et de servir de repoussir aux novateurs. … Le marché reste donc la principale
instance d’évaluation et hiérarchisation.…’ pp.228–9, Christophe Charle, Les
Intellectuels en Europe au XIXe Siècle: Essai d’histoire comparée, Seuil, Paris, 1996.
10 Le Chapelier’s attempts to persuade the journeymen carpenters and other crafts-
men in Paris that their corporate bodies were inconsistent with revolutionary
ideals has been noted, but most lawyers repeatedly declined to accept that revo-
lution entailed any change in their own institutions. For French, American and
English examples see p.632, Burrage, 2006, op. cit.
11 Lenore O’Boyle, ‘The Problem of an Excess of Educated Men in Western Europe
1800–1850’, pp.471–95, Journal of Modern History, XLII, December 1970; ‘The
Middle Class in Western Europe 1815–1848’, pp.826–45, American Historical
Review, 71, 1966.
12 p.174, Walter M. Kotschnig, Unemployment in the Learned Professions: An Inter-
national Study of Occupational and Educational Planning, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1937.
13 ibid.
14 Between 1934–1939, when the solicitors’ profession appeared to be overcrowded,
the Law Society raised the standards of its examinations and their members
halved the number of articled clerks. p.183, Brian Abel-Smith and Robert Stevens,
Lawyers and the Courts: A Sociological Study of the English Legal System 1750–1965,
Heinemann, London, 1967.
15 The same factors were still present in the late 1960s and are the most plausible
explanation of the fact that the student protests in Britain were less militant,
violent and extensive than those in other societies. p.109, Colin Crouch, The
Student Revolt, Bodley Head, London, 1970.
16 pp.212–14, Collini, op. cit.
17 p.39, Perry Anderson, ‘The Origins of the Present Crisis’, pp.11–52, Perry
Anderson and Robin Blackburn, eds, Towards Socialism, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, New York, 1965. For Marx and Engels’ criticisms see for example
pp.28, 523–4, and elsewhere in their articles and correspondence. Marx and Engels,
1953, op. cit.
18 pp.631–2, Burrage, 2006, op. cit.
19 p.323, J. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1870, Longman, London,
1979. The largest popular protest in the 19th century, one might remember, resulted
in no fatalities at all. p.124, David Goodway, London Chartism 1838–1948,
20 This bias is, or was, deeply embedded in British labour history. One young
labour historian, Robert Neville, in the course of research for his PhD, had to
investigate disturbances in Featherstone during the 1893 lockout when, accord-
ing to local myth, ‘troops marched in with drums beating and shot down 60
miners.’ He found that 26 troops entered the town, and that two miners had
been accidentally shot and killed, and that the union leadership had been
deeply concerned to prevent violence. Once they heard of his findings, the local
branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthur Scargill, vetoed any
further co-operation with him. He appealed for support to all the most distin-
guished labour historians in the land, but they refused to help him in any way.
In disgust, he left academic life. John Crossland, ‘When the redcoats came to
Featherstone’, p.10, The Times, 15th August, 1984.
21 p.111, Lenin, op. cit. The italics are Lenin’s.
22 ‘Socialism only became available’, he observed, ‘after 1850 just at the moment
when the working class movement was at its lowest and least receptive ebb.’
p.35, Anderson, op. cit.
23 Jane Elgar and Bob Simpson, ‘A Final Appraisal of Bridlington?’: An Evaluation
of TUC Disputes Committee Decisions 1974–1991’, British Journal of Industrial
Relations, 32:1 March, 1994. The title is interrogatory because the authors won-
dered whether legislation in 1993 might not mean the end of these voluntary
procedures. It didn’t.
24 though prior to the formation of the CIO, the AFL had a comparable domestic
disputes procedure. n 26, infra. It was the refusal to accept the rulings of the
AFL’s Committee of Industrial Organization, which led to the formation of the
Congress of Industrial Organization.
25 Gallie’s comparison of oil refineries illustrates the contrast. The French workers
were far more militant, but organizationally weak, while the British had consider-
able organizational strength, but displayed little or no class militancy. pp.291–318,
op. cit.
26 Some examples of its rulings affecting the building trades are given pp.514–18,
Galenson, op. cit.
27 p.141, McKibbin, op. cit. He was referring to Nigel Dennis, F. Henriques and
C. Slaughter, Coal is our Life, Heinemann, London, 1956.
28 There do not appear to be any longitudinal comparisons of public and private
sectors, but the data strongly suggests that the former were more strike-prone
through the 1980s and early 1990s. pp.144–6, Rachel Bailey, ‘Public Sector Indus-
trial Relations’, pp.121–50, in Ian J. Beardwell, ed., Contemporary Industrial Relations:
A Critical Analysis, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996.
29 p.288, Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour,
Allen & Unwin, London, 1961.
30 For a brisk account of the ‘syndicalist’ post-war nationalizations in France and
comparisons with Britain pp.32–9, 96–105, Mario Einaudi, Maurice Byé and
Ernesto Rossi, Nationalization in France and Italy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
N.Y., 1955; a detailed case study pp.70–5, 76–84, 88, 102, Robert L. Frost, Alter-
nating Currents: Nationalized Power in France, 1946–1970, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, N.Y., 1991; Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology
of Formal Organization, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1966.
31 These and related points are explored in Michael Burrage, ‘Nationalization and
the Professional Ideal’, pp.253–72, Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 2, May 1973.
32 The history of this informal grouping has never been told but they sometimes
surfaced in the press. p.19b, ‘Chairmen of Nationalized Industries to meet
Chancellor’, The Times, January 6th, 1973; p.2a, ‘Chairmen to meet Ministers’,
The Times, January 9th, 1973.
33 Roger Dyson and K. Spary, ‘Professional Associations’, pp.145–76 in Nick Bosanquet,
ed., Industrial Relations in the National Health Service – The Search for a System,
King Edwards Hospital Fund, 1979.
34 It was formally established in 1981. It continues, as a minority association, to the
present day. See www.apap.org.uk Its current General Secretary, Mark Weather-
head, a working paramedic, was kind enough, during a tea break, to review its
present circumstances and major problem – the hostility of established unions.
35 NHS Management Inquiry, Team Leader: Roy Griffiths, Mimeo, October 1983.
36 pp.16–19, Philip Strong and Jane Robinson, The NHS – Under New Management,
Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1990.
37 With the significant exception of the BBC, which assumed that it invented the
occupations of all its staff, and therefore formed a house union, the Association
of Broadcasting Staff. Once television came along, this assumption was clearly
inaccurate, and it was therefore engaged in long-running disputes with trade
unions of the film industry, most notably my own former union, the Associa-
tion of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians.
38 Saunders is the only British sociologist to draw the conclusion from mobility
data that Britain is ‘one of the less unequal social orders the world has wit-
nessed’. He went on to observe that British sociologists are ‘loath to believe that
the class system is not as rigid as they had hitherto supposed.’ He did not,
however, suggest why this should be so. pp.42, 79–83, Peter Saunders, Social
Class and Stratification, Routledge, London, 1990.
39 R.H. Turner, ‘Sponsored and Contest Mobility and the School System’, American
Sociological Review, pp.855–67, Vol. 25, 1960.
40 pp.82–4, Savage, 2000, op. cit.
41 It is riveted into Giddens’ theory of ‘structuration’. fn 18, p.347, supra.
42 pp.187–93, Ishida, op. cit. In the Fox and Miller’s study cited earlier, Britain had
lower equality of opportunity into the ‘elite’, which apparently included most
higher professional occupations, but higher equality of opportunity for entry to
skilled ‘strata’. p.580, op. cit.
43 fn 28, p.343, supra.
44 Whittaker did not give the union membership of these two occupations, but the
rancour between them seems to have been greatest in the British plant that had
nine unions. He himself thought that to explain this contrast we should ‘look to
aspects of (Japanese) employment relations – common orientation programme
and recreation, common payment and promotion systems, communications and
“company consciousness” – and possibly to a propensity to be less openly crit-
ical of people.’ pp.81, 148–51, D.H. Whittaker, Managing Innovation: A Study of
British and Japanese Factories, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990.
45 The same combination seems to have occurred to Granick. Having documented
the egalitarianism and openness of big business in Britain, he immediately added
that ‘Of course, there is no intention to argue that class consciousness is weak in
British society…’ but he does not pursue this surprising combination. p.178,
Granick, 1979, op. cit.
46 Elsewhere he appeared to subscribe to the conventional view that high rates
of mobility create ‘some uncertainty in class consciousness.’ pp.498, 512–16,
Wright, op. cit.
47 Millerson pointed out that with respect to their disciplinary proceedings ‘Nor-
mally, courts cannot intervene in the proceedings…’. p.173, Millerson, op. cit.
The relative absence of legislative interference in the affairs of the bar until
1990, is a constant theme of Burrage, 2006, op. cit. but see especially pp.539–40,
ibid.
48 p.176, Rule, op. cit.
49 p.177, ibid.
50 p.78, Derry, op. cit.
51 For superlative comparative documentation of this point see Lorenz; Dubois
op. cit.
52 p.115, George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1962,
first published, 1937.
53 pp.73–4, M.L. Bush, op. cit.
54 p.215, Arnstein, op. cit.
55 see Harris’ collection of 509 contemporary professional codes. op. cit.
56 Sykes explained how many of the so-called restrictive practices in the printing
industry unions were intended to uphold the equality, unity and solidarity of
members, but then decided that the ultimate cause of these moral sentiments
was the conflict of their economic interests with those of their employers.
A.J.M. Sykes, ‘Unity and Restrictive Practices in the British Printing Industry’,
pp.239–54, Sociological Review, Vol. 8, 1960.
57 H.M.D. Parker, Manpower: A Study of War-Time Policy and Administration, History
of the Second World War, Vol. VII, H.M.S.O., Longmans Green, London, 1957.
58 pp.462–4, ibid.
59 Allan Flanders, The Fawley Productivity Agreements, Faber, 1963.
60 see Behagg’s accounts, pp.254–6, supra.
61 This is hardly, of course, an unusual phenomenon. It resembles the ‘tribal’,
regimental loyalties of the British Army, which are only forgotten in the face of
the enemy. Or the rivalry between brothers in China described by Freedman.
‘The members of a lineage struggle amongst themselves for scarce resources of
land and honour, but they stand shoulder to shoulder when they are confronted
by another lineage.’ p.159, Maurice Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien
and Kwantung, Athlone, London, 1971.
62 This kind of simultaneous collective negotiation by several unions is, one might
notice, extremely rare in either France or the United States.
63 p.96, Flanders, op. cit.
64 One of the seven unions, the electricians, agreed to upgrading, but only in limited
numbers, 12 to be precise, and under strict conditions. They then put forward
the counter-proposal that the remaining 260 of their mates be organized as ‘a
class of second-grade craftsmen’, who would perform ‘an agreed list of easier
electrical jobs’. Their less intransigent position was probably due to the fact that
that their union already included some mates as members, and was, Flanders
pointed out, more ‘industrial’ than any other craft union. pp.109–10, ibid.
Chapter 11 The Class System Comes to an End

1 The most notable pieces of legislation were the Employment Acts 1980 and
1982, the Trade Union Act 1984, and the Wages Act 1986. They are described in
Charles Hanson, Taming the Trade Unions: A Guide to the Thatcher Governments
Employment Reforms, Macmillan, London, 1991.
2 See the labour relations pages of www.ons.gov.uk Four government-funded
national (WIRS) surveys, each with samples of more than 2,000 enterprises and
more than one million employees, provide longitudinal comparisons of union

activities before, during and after the Thatcher years. W.W. Daniel and N. Milward,
Workplace Industrial Relations in Britain: The DE/PSI/ESRC Survey, Gower, Aldershot,
1983; N. Milward and M. Stevens, British Workplace Industrial Relations 1980–1984:
The DE/ESRC/PSI/ACAS Surveys, Gower, Aldershot, 1986; N. Milward et al., Work-
place Industrial Relations in Transition: The DE/ESRC/PSI/ACAS Surveys, Dartmouth,
Aldershot, 1992; Mark Cully et al., Britain at Work; as depicted by the 1988 Work-
place Employee Relations Survey, Routledge, London, 1999.
3 In 1962, some 39% of all trade unionists were covered by closed shop agree-
ments. W.E.J. MacCarthy, The Closed Shop in Britain, Basil Blackwell, Oxford,
1964. In 1980, five million employees were covered by such arrangements. In
1990, only a half a million were covered, and by 1998, about 2% of workplaces
reported that employees had to be union members in order to get or keep their
jobs. See WIRS, 1999, op. cit.
4 Simon Burgess, Carol Propper and Deborah Wilson, ‘Explaining the Growth in
the Number of Applications to Industrial Tribunals 1972–1997’, Employment
Relations Research Series No. 10, Department of Trade and Industry, London,
1998.
5 Though the gross figure hides considerable fluctuations by cause. pp.23–5,
Department of Trade and Industry, Moving Forward: Report of the Employment
Tribunal System Taskforce, HMSO, London, 2002, www.dti.gov.uk In recent
times, new procedural rules have reduced the numbers of claims they have
heard. ‘Industrial tribunal cases down by 28%’, Jonathan Moules, Financial
Times, 29th April 2006.
6 For an overview of the Thatcher governments’ policies on seven professions see
Michael Burrage, ‘Mrs Thatcher against deep structures: ideology, impact and
ironies of an eleven-year confrontation’, Institute of Governmental Studies Working
Papers, University of California, Berkeley, June 1992. The corrosive effects of the
ethos of her era on the British Army, to whom she owed so much, emerge inter-
mittently in pp.xxii, 114, 480, Beevor, op. cit.
7 Mrs Thatcher herself did little to disguise her contempt for civil servants. ‘She
doesn’t think that clever chaps like us should be here at all,’ said one of
Hennessy’s informants. ‘We should be outside, making profits.’ Another com-
plained of being ‘told by politicians that they don’t want whingeing, analysis or
integrity…’ that we must simply ‘do as we are told.’ Civil service methods were
‘repeatedly compared unfavourably with the superior methods of private busi-
ness.’ Ministers constantly reminded them that ‘they have several friends in the
private sector who could do the job in the morning with one hand tied behind
their back…’ pp.169–73, Patrick Cosgrave, Thatcher: The First Term, Bodley Head,
London, 1985; p.633, Peter Hennessy, Whitehall, Pimlico, London, 2001. For
similar views in her own words, pp.45–9, Thatcher, op. cit.
8 Most bluntly in the green papers that preceded the reform of the legal profes-
sions, especially the first. Lord Chancellor’s Department, The Work and Organ-
ization of the Legal Profession, Cmnd 570, HMSO, 1989; Contingency Fees, Cmnd
571, HMSO, 1989; Conveyancing by Authorized Practitioners, Cmnd 572, HMSO,
1989.
9 As Kavanagh and Richards observed, ‘she thought that civil servants’ role should
be to serve ministers and not their own perception of the public interest.’ p.181,
op. cit.
10 pp.138–9, Stephen Harrison and Waqar i.U. Ahmad, ‘Medical Autonomy and the
U.K. State 1975 to 2025’, Sociology, pp.129–46, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2000.
11 P. Thompson, ‘The Meaning of Vocational Qualifications’, Education & Training,

May/June 1989.
12 In a few cases, however, employers put up strong resistance, and those boards
survived. The best general survey of the reform of vocational training is by
Catherine Bush, From Voluntarism to Regulation: Awarding Bodies in English Educa-
tion and Training: A Case Study of City and Guilds, Occasional Paper No. 10, Institute
of Education, University of London, 1993.
13 Many observers at the time were convinced that these schemes were not intended
to provide a substitute for the training provided by the ITBs, but simply to
prevent the problem of youth unemployment becoming an electoral liability.
For a particularly insightful and informed analysis of YOPS and YTS versus tra-
ditional apprenticeship see pp.8–24, Peter Cappelli, ‘Youth Apprenticeship in
Britain: Lessons for the United States’, Industrial Relations, Vol. 35, No. 1, 1996.
14 A negotiator of the Royal Institute of British Architects called the NCVQ ‘the
most serious threat to the professions in their chartered existence.’ The voca-
tional qualifications it proposed were ‘designed to render professionals redun-
dant and their professional institutes obsolete.’ Peter Smith, ‘NVQ peril for
professions’, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 24th February 1995.
15 After 17 years of these initiatives and schemes, the Major Government backtracked
in its final months, rediscovered the merits of apprenticeship. It inaugurated a
‘modern apprenticeship’. This was, however, also to be state-administered. In
the Education Act of 1997, it also replaced the NCVQ with a less intrusive
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.
16 p.4, Jonathan Payne, ‘Government seeks to expand and revitalize modern
apprenticeships’. European Industrial Relations Observatory On-line, www.eiro.euro-
found.eu.int/2002/10/feature/UK0210105F.html This site includes a full review
of recent reports, legislation and government action on ‘modern’ apprentice-
ships.
17 For a discussion of the reports of the Prices and Incomes Board in 1967, 1969,
and 1971 of the Monopolies Commission, 1970, 1974, and 1976 see Michael
Zander, Legal Services for the Community, Temple Smith, London, 1978; Director
General of Fair Trading, Restrictions on the Kind of Organization Through Which
Members of Professions May Offer Their Services, Office of Fair Trading, London,
1986.
18 The first mention of solicitors in Which? is p.112, ‘Solicitors’ Charges’, February,
1977. Thereafter solicitors appeared frequently see p.584, ‘Solicitors’ Negligence’,
October, 1977; p.297, ‘Solicitors’, May, 1978; p.258, ‘Solicitors’ Charges’, April,
1978; p.338, ‘Solicitors as Investment Advisers’, June, 1978; all in Which?
Consumers’ Association, London.
19 p.105, OECD Documents, Scoreboard of Indicators, OECD, Paris, 1994.
20 Foreign Direct Investment (WIR 2006 data) http://stats.unctad.org
21 quoted p.245, Jonathan Wood, Wheels of Misfortune: The Rise and Fall of the
British Motor Industry, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1988.
22 For a case study see Philip Garrahan and Paul Stewart, The Nissan Enigma: Flex-
ibility at Work in a Local Economy, Mansell, London, 1992; a general survey, Nick
Oliver and Barry Wilkinson, The Japanization of British Industry: New Developments
in the 90s, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992.
23 p.789, Kynaston, op. cit.
24 p.739, ibid.
25 Business leaders’ general lack of enthusiasm for her trade union reforms is evident
from her own account of them. pp.105–6, Thatcher, op. cit. Thereafter they
remained lukewarm see ‘Managers warn on union reform’, Financial Times,

11th Nov, 1991. Sir John Harvey-Jones, the former chief executive of ICI, later
remarked that ‘though he had crossed their path in the past, trade unions … did
much to check corporate excess. If trade unions did not exist they would need to
be invented.’ While “some adjustment” had been necessary, the pendulum had
swung too far against unions. As a result … it has been possible … to treat
people in a way no sensible, sensitive businessman would.’ p.3, The Independent,
15th March, 1995. Martin Taylor, chief executive of Barclays, observed that ‘British
capitalism’s rejection of social values and reaction against earlier collectivist
excesses has gone too far. Too much individualism is bad for too many individuals.’
p.24, Financial Times, March 16th, 1995.
26 This is the conclusion of the WIRS study, op. cit. though Disney et al. detected
an increase in unfavourable attitudes to trade unions. p.17, Richard Disney,
Amanda Gosling and Stephen Machin, What has happened to union recognition in
Britain?, Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper, No. 130, London
School of Economics and Political Science, 1993.
27 pp.308–11, A. Pollert, ‘The “Flexible Firm”: fixation or fact’, Work, Employment &
Society, pp.281–316, Vol. 2, Sept. 1988. For an account of an American-owned
firm that, most definitely, took advantage of the legislation see pp.328–9, infra.
28 p.178, Milward et al., 1990, op. cit.
29 For empirical data to support this see pp.181–7, Bernard Casey, ‘Survey Evidence
on Trends in “Non-Standard” Employment’, pp.179–99, in Anna Pollert, ed.,
Farewell to Flexibility?, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991.
30 pp.253–7, Simon Jenkins, Accountable to None: The Tory Nationalization of Britain,
Hamish Hamilton, London, 1995. For contemporaneous French efforts to
decentralize see pp.134–5, Levy, op. cit.
31 Some of the new managerial and consultancy functions of professional bodies
are described in Jeff Watkins, The Future of U.K. Professional Associations,
Cheltenham Strategic Publications, Cheltenham, 1996.
32 For examples of the invention of classes for marketing purposes see
www.businessballs.com or ‘The Fish Can Sing’s Guide to Britain’s New Middle
Classes’, www.classof2004.co.uk
33 Mike Savage, Geoff Bagnall and B. Longhurst, ‘Ordinary, ambivalent and defen-
sive: class identitites in the North of England’, pp.875–92, Sociology, Vol. 35,
No. 2, 2001.
34 Jonathan Foster, ‘Why Cortonwood is doomed to die’, p.7, The Observer, Sunday,
24th February 1985.
35 Their support for her policies, as well as that of Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown,
is comprehensively documented in Jenkins, 2006, op. cit.
36 Jill Sherman et al., ‘Labour’s Army of Consultants adds 1p to income tax’, The
Times, 2nd May 2006.
37 p.175, Cannadine, op. cit.
38 pp.60–1, Patrick Seyd and Paul Whitely, New Labour’s Grassroots: The Trans-
formation of the Labour Party Membership, Palgrave, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2002.
39 fn 6, p.39, supra.
40 p.148, Orwell, 1937, op. cit.
41 He went on to observe that while Americans are remarkably free of guilt about
class, or ethnic relations, they feel intensely guilty about race relations. Trow,
1992, op. cit. Germans evidently believe that nationalism was their country’s
great sin, and have therefore turned themselves into the least overtly nationalist
and most European country of Europe.
42 though recent evidence on the latter is ambiguous. In a survey carried out in

1990 Marshall found that mobility had increased in recent years. G. Marshall,
A. Swift and S. Roberts, Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in
Industrial Societies, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997. Heath reported that men born
after 1940 were more likely to be upwardly mobile than those born before 1900.
Anthony Heath, ‘Social Mobility’, in A.H. Halsey, ed., Social Trends in British
Society, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000. However, in a comparison of a cohort
born in 1958 with a cohort born in 1970 Blanden et al. found inter-generational
mobility had fallen markedly, and was the lowest of the six industrial societies
they studied. Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin, Intergenerational
Mobility in Europe and North America, Centre for Economic Performance, London
School of Economics, 2005. In their comparison of nine societies, Müller et al.
observed that societies which have ‘a lower degree of credentialism’, England
being their foremost example, ‘also show signs of a lower degree of class inequal-
ities of educational opportunities.’ p.88, Müller et al., op. cit. There is a real poss-
ibility, therefore, that as England moves away from practice-based training
and qualifications and ‘widens’ educational opportunities, class inequalities in
education will increase.
43 Joanne Monger, ‘Labour disputes in 2004, Labour Market Trends, Vol. 113,
No. 06, 2005, www.statistics.gov.uk Fewer days were lost in strikes in 2005 than
in any year ‘since records began nearly 200 years ago.’ The Times 17th Feb. 2006.
44 Hakim argued that this was not simply a response to unemployment, since
surveys almost always reported ‘positive aspirations … for the independence and
autonomy of freelance work or running their own business.’ But then they
would, wouldn’t they? pp.200–3, Catherine Hakim, Social Change and Innovation
in the Labour Market, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998.
45 pp.2, 9, 18, 20–3, 26–7, 29–31, Muzyka et al., op. cit.
46 Central governments were, in fact, usually far more respectful towards them
than they were towards local government, which they knew was a relatively late
and insecure addition to the British political system.
47 For the first and second of these see pp.30–1, 47, Thatcher, op. cit.
48 pp.17–18, Graham Zellick, Universities and the Law: The Erosion of Institutional
Autonomy, University of London Press, London, 2001; p.4, Martin Trow, ‘American
Perspectives on British Higher Education under Thatcher and Major, Working
Paper, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, 1995. The decline
of academic self-government as a whole over the Thatcher and Major years is
described in pp.135–55, Jenkins, op. cit., and updated pp.120–4, 177–9, Simon
Jenkins, Thatcher’s Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts, Allen Lane, London, 2006.
49 pp.134–5, A.I. Tillyard, A History of University Reform: From 1800 A.D. to the
Present Time, Heffer, Cambridge, 1913.
50 p.18, The Times, July 8, 1993.
51 There can however, be little doubt that Mrs Thatcher herself, her advisers and
ministers believed they were making schools more ‘independent’ and ‘self-
governing’. See the brilliant analysis in pp.128–33, Jenkins, 1995, op. cit.; pp.570–8,
590–7, Thatcher, op. cit.
52 Press reports suggested that Whitehall will ‘lose control over all England’s hos-
pitals’ to an independent regulator, who will have power to check their accounts,
approve all their major financial decisions, and most importantly, ‘set down the
key services that individual foundation trusts must supply.’ The regulator can
stop hospitals ‘luring staff from other NHS institutions with higher pay offers’
and ‘can even replace entire boards of governors.’ This independent regulator
will, however, be appointed for an initial fixed five-year term. ‘Milburn to give
up control of hospital coffers’, p.10, The Times, March 14th, 2003.
53 p.511, ibid.
54 p.514, Grunberg, op. cit.
55 Michael Edwardes, appointed chief executive of British Leyland in 1978, decided to
end what he described as the ‘mutuality’ between employer and workers, drastically
curtailed the rights of shop stewards, fired their convenor, and installed, without
negotiation, an incentive payment system. Michael Edwardes, Back From the Brink:
An Apocalyptic Experience, Collins, London, 1983.
56 pp.187–8, Kavanagh and Richards, op. cit.
57 Health Circular HC(90)16, Department of Health, May 1990.
58 pp.65–88, Jenkins, op. cit. Government spokesmen sometimes defended re-
grading on the grounds that it provided ‘a career structure’ for clinical nurses,
meaning a career up a bureaucratic ladder. Nurses evidently saw it differently. In
its ‘election manifesto’ of 1992 the Royal College called for ‘a clinical career
structure’ and wanted to see that ‘nurses who go into management retaining a
clear role in clinical work with patients.’ A Manifesto for Nursing and Health,
Royal College of Nursing, London, 1992.
59 see Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International
Scientific Management Movement, California, 1980; William M. Tsutsui, Manufac-
turing Ideology: Scientific Management in the Twentieth Century Japan, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1992.
60 The unwillingness of British managers to make use of scientific management
methods has been documented on numerous occasions. Most of the 68 reports of
the Anglo-American Productivity Council, compiled by teams of employers, man-
agers and trade unionists who visited American firms between 1946 and 1952 make
this point. Their findings were summarized by Graham Hutton, We Too Can
Prosper: The Promise of Productivity, Allen & Unwin, London, 1953. In 1970, a study
of 24 West Midlands engineering and metalworking firms found ‘very low levels
of … the use of analytical techniques and productivity measurement.’ p.400,
N.A. Dudley, ‘Comparative Productivity Analysis Study in the United Kingdom
West Midlands Engineering and Metalworking Industries’, International Journal of
Production Research, Vol. 8, 1970. A 1983 survey of work study in British industry
noted ‘the overall low usage of all the techniques of work study, particularly in
small to medium-size firms … A high proportion of production operations man-
agers have learned about work study and proceeded to ignore it.’ pp.301–2, Keith
G. Lockyer et al., ‘Work Study Techniques in U.K. Manufacturing Industry’, Omega,
11, 1983. A comparative study of the automotive components industry in 1992,
pointed out that ‘British engineers were particularly weak in work and method
study.’ p.84, Christopher Carr, ‘Productivity and Skills in Vehicle Component
Manufacturers in Britain, Germany, the USA and Japan’, National Institute Review,
February, 1992. There are many more reports of similar import.
61 Hence the extensive promotion from the shopfloor, and the ‘chimney stack’
managerial career patterns noted by pp.174–8, Granick, op. cit.
62 See the figures collated by pp.304–8, Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network
Society, Vol. 1, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996. In 1971, managers were 3.7% of the
British labour force, by 1990 they were 11%.
63 David Riesman, Constraint and Variety in American Education, Doubleday,
New York, 1958.
64 though the full impact was felt after she left office. In 1980 1.5% of all university
undergraduates were taking a business or management degree. In the year she
left office, 1992, this had risen to 4%, and by 2004–2005 to over 13%. pp.18–19,
University Statistics 1980, Vol. 1 Students and Staff, UGC, Cheltenham, 1982;
pp.27–8, University Statistics 1992–3, Vol. 1 Students and Staff, UGC, Cheltenham,
1993; www.hesa.ac.uk.
65 although they had been applied extensively, but unsuccessfully, in American
schools in the 1920s. Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962.
66 For an example see Gennadi Pisarevsky, Soviet Economy: The Strategy of Intensi-
fication, Novosti Press, Moscow, 1987. The only economic problem that the author
admitted to was that the annual rate of growth had slowed to 3%, but he added
quickly that ‘the Soviet people are accustomed to other growth rates.’ p.10, ibid.
67 pp.132–42, Robert Lewis, Science and Industrialisation in the U.S.S.R.: Industrial
Research and Development 1917–1940, Macmillan, London, 1979.
68 The analogy is amusingly adumbrated in Ronald Amann, ‘A Sovietological
View of Modern Britain’, lecture delivered at University of Edinburgh, December
1995, and extensively discussed in Andrew Ryder, ‘Reform and U.K. Higher
Education in the Enterprise Era’, Higher Education Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1,
January 1996.
69 The differences between the departments of industrial firms and universities are
cogently explained in pp.19–20, Trow, 1995.
70 pp.10–11, ibid. It amounted, as Trow pointed out, to commending the govern-
ments’ policies.
71 Tim Miles, ‘Record GCSE Grades Fixed’, Evening Standard, 23rd August, 2001;
Angelique Chrisafis, ‘Widespread cheating devalues school tests’, Guardian Unlimited,
28th October 2002, http:// education.guardian. co.uk Warwick Mansell, ‘Schools’
cheating culture exposed’, p.1, Times Educational Supplement, 20th May 2005. His
report went on to say that teachers thought it was ‘widespread’.
72 ‘Head is jailed for altering 11-plus papers’, p.1, The Times, 8th March 2003.
73 summarized in p.6, The Daily Telegraph, March 5th, 2003. In July of the same
year, the chairman of the British Medical Association complained that ‘a target-
driven Government had created a climate of fear and deception that distorted
medical practice and forced the honest to lie.’ He received a standing ovation.
p.8, The Times, July 1st, 2003.
74 www.chi.nhs.uk
75 pp.89–109, Jenkins, op. cit. Five officers in Luton were found to have offered
favours to remand prisoners for confessions to crimes that they did not commit
that improved their clear-up rate. ‘Officers quit in favours probe’, 15 May 2006,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england My own repeated efforts to have a London
police station record a credit card fraud tend to corroborate the view that the
recording has itself become suspect. So far as I could establish, this station
recorded crimes informally and formally, and only the latter, one imagines,
appear in official statistics.
76 He was charged with 14 offences, and asked for 140 more to be considered. The
judge said the case was so serious that an immediate custodial sentence was
required. ‘If others were to act in a similar fashion, then the whole system would
be immediately and utterly destroyed.’ The Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority investigated 96 allegations of similar malpractice during the year, and
annulled the results of the examinations in seven schools. The Times, 8th March
2003, op. cit. In another case the headmaster of a school at the lower end of
the league tables was reprimanded by the professional conduct committee of the
General Teaching Council after he had allowed pupils more than the allotted time,
and encouraged them to re-read their answers, saying to some, ‘Do you really
mean this?’, Evening Standard, 7th May 2003.
77 See Pay Modernization: A New Contract for NHS Consultants in England, National
Audit Office, London, 2007, www.nao.org.uk Sir Alan Craft, president of the
Royal Academy of Medical Colleges, explained to incredulous members of the
Health Committee of the House of Commons on 18th May 2006 that this was
because consultants have been compelled to curtail their voluntary contri-
butions to the NHS to conform with its new contractual arrangements and man-
agerial systems. The opportunities for similar declines in the productivity of
other hospital staff are considerable, since the actual working time of a majority
of them routinely exceeds their contractually paid working hours. See p.10.
National Survey of NHS Staff 2005, www.healthcarecommission.org.uk
78 pp.160–4, Bruce W. Ahlstrand, The Quest for Productivity: A Case Study of Fawley
after Flanders, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990.
79 pp.165–72, ibid.
80 There is no general survey of the spread of performance-related pay. A survey
conducted by the Institute of Personnel Development in 1997 reported a ‘deep
and rapid growth of performance pay systems’ over the past 15 years, but it fell
well short of being a national survey. Institute of Personnel Development,
Performance Pay Trends in the U.K., London, 1999, www.cipd.co.uk
81 On the peculiarities of its family structure see pp.190–1, 195, Alan MacFarlane,
The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition,
Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1978; Jill Kirby, Broken Hearts: Family Decline and the
Consequences for Society, Centre of Policy Studies, London, 2002, www.cps.org.uk
Kirby’s comparative data showed Britain was ‘the divorce capital of Europe’
in 1998, and also ‘top of the table for lone parenting’. More recent evidence,
however, suggests it may have lost the top spot on both counts. In church atten-
dance and belief, Britain is about average by European standards, but Europe as a
whole is, Davie pointed out, exceptionally secular by world standards, and espe-
cially its Protestant North. pp.9–10, Grace Davie, Europe – the Exceptional Case:
Parameters of Faith in the Modern World, Darton Longman & Todd, London, 2002.
82 pp.631–2, Burrage, 2006, op. cit.
83 For a typically robust statement of his views see his response to Mr Blair’s
‘respect agenda’. Simon Jenkins, ‘All this drivel does is bring Basra closer to our
doorsteps’, p.25, The Guardian, 11 January 2006. He seems, however, to be no
less hostile to self-governing corporate institutions of doctors, teachers, nurses,
police and others. Mr Blair’s ‘respect agenda’ is described below.
84 in an ICM poll on behalf of BBC-2 www.overseas-emigration.co.uk The wish
to emigrate was, therefore, marginally higher than the 51% found among
adolescents in Arab countries in the Arab Human Development Report 2002, United
Nations, New York, 2003.
85 ‘England and Wales top crime league’, pp.1, 6, The Guardian, Monday, May 26th,
1997, gave preliminary results from the International Crime Victimisation Survey
of the experience of crime in 11 countries during 1995, which showed ‘that
England and Wales have a worse crime record than the United States or other
industrialized countries’, including Northern Ireland. The final results from 19
countries confirmed this report. See http://ruljis.leidenuniv.nl/group/jfcr/www/
icvs/data The report of the Sixth United Nations Survey on Crime and Criminal
Justice Systems covered 37 societies, and found that England and Wales were
among world leaders in burglary, motor vehicle and petty crimes through the
1990s, though only average in serious violence, and below average in homicides.
Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe and North America, HEUNI, Helsinki, 2003.
For data on the exceptionally high proportion of young people arrested and sen-
tenced in England and Wales see pp.4–5, Gemma Buckland and Alex Stephens,
Review of Effective Practice with Young Offenders in Mainland Europe, European
Institute of Social Services, Canterbury, Kent, 2001. For the numbers incarcer-
ated see Roy Walmsley, ‘World Prison Populations List’, Research Findings, No. 88,
Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate, London, 1999,
www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds England and Wales are not, however, above the
OECD average in the number of adults imprisoned, OECD Factbook, Paris, 2006.
86 pp.27–33, UNICEF, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in
Rich Countries, Innocenti Research Centre, Florence, 2007.
87 These surveys are reproduced on www.healthcarecommission.org.uk, op. cit.
88 pp.15, 32 National Audit Office, A Safer Place to Work, London, 2003, DT
27th March, 2003.
89 www.teachersupport.co.uk The Scottish survey had reported 5,412 ‘incidents’ in
2001–2002, 71% of which included physical violence. www.Scotland.gov.uk/stats.
Both the estimate and the report have, however, been removed from these web-
sites. See, however, ‘Review of School Violence Figures’, 27 January 2004 and
‘Large Rise in Attacks on Teachers’, 31 March 2006 news.bbc.co.uk; ‘Survey
reveals half of respondents have suffered physical abuse by pupils’, 23 February,
2007, www.teachersupport.co.uk Respondents were 433 teachers, who responded
to a web page invitation.
90 p.35, Anne Wilkin et al., Behaviour In Scottish Schools, Scottish Executive, Edinburgh,
2006.
91 Tony Clark, Safer School Partnerships: Police in Schools, NFER, London, 2004.
92 www.johnmajor.co.uk Jenkins dated this concern with the private lives of
British citizens from the Thatcher governments, but gave no examples. p.189,
op. cit.
93 See ‘Give respect: get respect What is it?’ on the website of the Labour Party
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Index
Academies Behagg, Clive 254–5

in France & Russia 278 Berger, Suzanne 113–15
Advocates Berlanstein, Lenard 133
in France 106–8 Birnbaum, Pierre 132
in Russia 65–6, 83 Blair, Tony 217, 296, 320, 324, 327,
Affirmative action 148–9 341
Afro-Americans 148, 160–2 Blanqui, Auguste 87, 95, 97
Alexander II, tsar of Russia 60, 64, 72, Blumin, Stuart 153, 163, 191
82–3 Bolsheviks 63–9, 72–7, 81–2
Aluminium as managers of stratification 71–81
development in U.S. v. U.K. 229 Boltanski, Luc 112–13
Amann, P.H. 96–7 Boston (U.S.) 165, 186, 189–91
Ambulance personnel in England 290, Bourdieu, Pierre 42, 129, 131–8, 222
334 Bourgeoisie & bourgeoisies
Aminzade, Ronald 89–90, 92 France, absence of class of 4, 31–2,
American Federation of Labor (AFL) 88, 106
161–2, 168–9, 171–7, 180–1, 203, creation of classes in lieu of
285–6 111–15, 209, 241
Amiens, Congress of (1906) 100–2 petty, research category of 31–2
Anderson, Perry 282–3 Russia, attempts to create 56–8,
Annan, Noel 276 209
Antitrust (U.S.) 172, 193–4, 211, 274 Bourses du travail 99–101, 104, 172
see also Market regulation Brentano, Lujo von 250
Apprenticeship Bureau des parties casuelles 119, 232
England 247–56, 267, 280, 299,
314–19 Cadres 111–13, 209
France 115 Canada 6, 33, 160, 175
U.S. 145–6, 157, 170 Cannadine, David 1, 39, 216, 321
Arendt, Hannah 141, 216 Capitalism
Aristocracy as basis of classes 30–4, 188
England 17, 28, 213–19, 231–2, 243, as engine of inequality 44
295–307 alongside slavery 161
Russia 49–58, 63–4, 70–3 struggles against 90, 167–9
the U.S. 149–50, 182, 188–90 under socialism 85
Auroux, laws (France 1982–1983) v. socialism 22–5
104–5 see also Car production, Markets,
Australia 3, 6, 13 Strikes, Workplaces
Caplow, Theodore 182
Baggage handlers in England 259–60 Car production 257–8, 317, 328–9
Bailyn, Bernard 145–6 Catherine the Great of Russia 50,
Baltzell, E. Digby 190, 197 52–3, 57
Bauer, Peter 16–17, 322 Centers, Richard 185–7, 205
Bauer, Michel 125, 131, 139 Centralization in England 324–7
BBC 288, 325 Charle, Christophe 110–11
446
Index 447
Charles II, King of England 215, Clubs

233–4, 242, 278, 325 England 222–3, 226, 248–9, 263
Charleston (U.S.) 151, 189 see also journeymen and trade
Charters societies
American 143–5, 152 France 94–7
English 215, 232–6, 295–7, 326 Russia 66, 73
Chavez, Cesar 177 U.S. 166, 170, 174, 189, 191, 197
Chicago, Ill. 162–3, 168–9, 189 Coke, Sir Edward 234
Chin & Chinovniki 50–5, 70, 209 Collini, Stefan 111, 276, 281
see also Civil servants, Russia Combination Laws 1799–1824 (U.K.)
Christoph, James 224–5 250–4, 273, 296
Civil servants Committee of Industrial Organization
England 218, 225, 228–9, 237–8, (U.S.) see Congress of
329, 332 Compagnonnage 89, 98, 262
France 4, 116–17, 121–3, 128–9, Company formation
131–2 see also grands corps England & France 120–1
Russia 50–5, 59–60, 64, 69–72 U.S. 143–4
U.S. 150–1, 156, 198 Comparative analysis
Civil societies methods 1–6, 26–30
as agents of class formation 38–45 surveys 6–14, 30–4, 204 see social
defined 36 mobility, workplaces, passim
relationship with state theories 19–34
England 213–16, 231–5, 262–9, Competition see markets
274, 288–306, 310–27 Computer development in U.K. 230
France 87–93, 105–15, 123–4, programmers 293–4 see also Minitel
139–40 Confédération Générale des Petites et
Russia 63–71, 82–6 Moyennes Entreprises 115
U.S. 141–50, 156–64, 176, 193, Confédération Général du Travail (CGT)
211 100–2, 169
relationship with state compared Conféderation Général des Cadres (CGC)
277–82, 306–8 112–13
and revolution 208–10 Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO)
Class & classes 162–5, 171–5, 177, 179–80, 203
agents of formation 36–45 Cooper, Jilly 5
conclusions about 207–13, Coventry 257–8
304–10 Crozier, Michel 133
cross-national data about 6–14, 30–5 Cumul des mandats 117
definition of 35–6
honour of 106, 152, 237, 297–303 Dahrendorf, Ralf 21–2, 24
identification of 45–9 Dartmouth College 144, 326
overlooked 46–7 DeMott, Benjamin 5, 148
system of 294–304 Deprofessionalization
see also Aristocracy, Bourgeoisie, American 150–3
Cadres, Intelligentsia, Markets, French 106
Middle Class and Working Derry, T.H. 253, 278
Class Devil’s Bargains in England 337
Classlessness Dicey, A.V. 271, 273
England 321–4, 328 Djilas, Milovan
Russia 22–3, 29, 36, 82–4 corroboration of 20–1
U.S. 8, 153, 160 rejection of 21–8, 33–4
Clayton Act 1914 (U.S.) 172, 193 theory of new class 19–21, 76
448 Index
Dobbin, Frank 121–2 Fawley (Esso) see oil refineries

Dogan, Mattei 115–19, 129, 138–40 Federal Trade Commission (U.S.) 193
Domhoff, G. William 197, 201–4 Fidler, John 225–6
Doyle, Daniel 212 Fifth French Republic 114–19, 125–8,
Dubois, Pierre 257 137, 209
Duverger, Maurice 39 Flanders, Allan 317 see also oil refineries
Dvorianstvo, service nobility Flexner, Abraham 154
see Aristocracy Russia Fonctionnaires see civil servants, France,
Dye, T.R. 198–9 and grands corps
Dyson, R. 289 Freeman, Joshua 163–4, 174–5
Freeze, Gregory 83
Ecole Centrale 107, 129, 131 Frontier thesis 159–60
Ecole des hautes études commerciales Fussell, Paul 5
(HEC) 129–30 Fuerst, J.S. 147, 204
Education
and class dissolution in the U.S. Gallaher, Art 183
159, 177–8, 268, 308 Gallie, Duncan 256–7
and class formation 23, 38–40 General Trades Union (GTU) of NYC
England 219–25, 266–9, 292, 311, 165–71, 186
325–7, 331–3, 338 Geoghegan, Thomas 173, 178
France 129–32, 135–8, 281 Giddens, Anthony 22–3, 25
Russia 63, 73–7, 82 Gingembre, Léon 115
U.S. 142–7, 154–9, 177–8, 184, Gladstone, William 237
196–200, 211, 308 Glorious Revolution 1688–89 214–16,
see also grandes écoles, private 231–2, 235, 242, 247, 262, 278, 296,
schools, public schools and 306
universities Gorbachev, Mikhail 20, 77, 332
Elites, integration of Graham, Margaret 229
England 213–17, 219–31 Grandes écoles 107–8, 110, 129–35,
France 107–8, 115–28, 131–2, 138, 220, 241
137–40 Grands corps 107–8, 116, 122, 129–32,
Russia 25, 74, 86 137, 139–40, 219
U.S. 143, 189–202 Granick, David 10, 29–30, 130–1, 225,
Elizabeth I, Queen of England 233 267, 293
see also Statute of Artificers Gretton, R.H. 232
Engels, Friedrich 88, 157, 168, 187 Griffiths, Roy, report of 290, 330
Entrepreneurs Gross, Neal 176–7
as agents of class formation 42–3 Grunberg, Leon 258–9, 328–9
England 224, 240–4, 258, 313, 320, Gutman, Herbert G. 162
324 Guttsman, Wilhelm 218–20
France 120–1, 126–8, 131–3, 241
Russia 54–5, 58, 84, 240 Harris, Nigel 266
U.S. 144, 189–90, 241 Haywood, ‘Big Bill’ 169–70
Erickson, J. & Goldthorpe, J. 11 Headmasters’ Conference, England 220
Ethnic differences, conflicts & Heath, Anthony 7, 221
discrimination Hendry, John 230
England 283, 320 Heyck, T.W. 276
Scotland 162 Hill, Joe 169
U.S. 148, 154, 159–67, 171–5, 181, Hoggart, Richard 212, 244
189–90 Horovitz, Jacques Henri 133–4
Exceptionalism, American 8, 157–64 House of Lords 217, 219, 231, 273, 296
Index 449
IBM 194 Khrushchev, Nikita 74, 77, 85

Immunities of trade unions & Kimball, Alan 61
professions Kingston, Paul 184–5, 197
in England 273, 295–6, 307, 311, Knights of Labor 168–71, 186, 285
320, 338 Kocka, Jürgen 147
Industrial organization Kotschnig, Walter 280
see Workplaces
Industrial Policy Labour Party (U.K.) 264–5, 278, 282,
in Britain 227–30 286, 295, 321
in France 119–28 Laissez faire 204, 269–74
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Laissez gouverner 269–74
169–71, 285 Laslett, John 158, 162
Injunctions (U.S.) 173 Lawyers
Inns of Court 42, 232–5, 266, 269, England 234 see inns of court
272, 274, 295 & solicitors
Intelligentsia France see advocates
in Russia 22–3, 54–5, 63–70, 75–7, Russia see advocates
277–82 U.S. 141, 150–5, 176–7, 186, 194,
Intellectuals 200
in England 275–82 Le Chapelier, loi (1791) 98
in France 4, 104–11, 276–82 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 39, 78, 82, 157,
Ishida, H. 29–30, 292–3 283
Ishii, T. 131 Letwin, William 192
Levin, Jennifer 235
Jackman, M.R. & R.W. 185, 187, 204 Levy, Jonah 125–7
Jackson, Andrew, President of the U.S. Lewchuk, Wayne 258
143, 150, 198 Lipset, S.M. 10, 157, 177
Jaher, Frederic 189–90, 201 Lloyd, G.I.H. 246–8, 255
James I, King of England 233, 269 Lodéve 88–90
James II, King of England 215, 234–5, London, City of
239, 242, 326 Big Bang of 1986 325
Japan 10, 13, 262 financial elite in 222, 317–18
collective bargaining 105 guilds & professions in 42, 232,
social mobility in 10, 26, 28–9, 281
32–3, 292 journeymen organizations in 245–9
workplaces in v. France 135–6 occupational prestige in 29
v. England 293, 316–17 protests during revolution 246
Jenkins, Simon 319, 339 quo warranto case against 252–3
Johnson, Christopher 88–90, 98 revolution in 233–42
Johnson, Robert 66–7 Lorenz, Edward 256
Journeymen & journeymen societies Los Angeles 189
England 42, 244–56, 295, 300 Lyon 96–7
France 89, 98–9 Lynd, R.S. & H.M. 179–82
U.S. 165–7
see also Trade Societies & Unions Mack, Edward C. 220
Magraw, Roger 96–7
Kabak (pub) 61 Major, John 310, 320–1, 324,
Kadushin, Charles 132 341–2
Kahn-Freund, Otto 271 Malia, Martin 65
Kavanagh, Dennis 224–5 Mannari, Hiroshi 10
Keynes, J.M. 270–1 Manning, Roberta 54–5, 62
450 Index
Market forces Monopolies

as determinants of classes 22–3, 37 England 227–8, 232–3, 270–1, 289
as solvents of classes 210–12, France 122–5
305–6 Russia 56–7
insulation from see Nationalization & U.S. 191–2 see also Antitrust
Professions Monopolies & Mergers Commission
organized by professions and unions (MMC) U.K. 228–30
in England 41, 44–5 Mustar, Philippe 127–8
Markets Müller, Walter 9
England 223, 310–22, 338
France 89, 114, 123–6, 133, 139 National Audit Office (U.K.) 340
Russia 56, 60, 84–6 National Health Service (NHS) (U.K.)
U.S. 145–56, 175, 187, 192, 196, 38, 290–1, 325–30, 334–5
211, 308 National Recovery Act 1932 (U.S.)
Market regulation by states 173, 180
England 228–30 National Labor Relations Board (U.S.)
France 126 176–7
Soviet Russia 83–6 National Recovery Administration
U.S. 192–6 (NRA) (U.S.) 194–6, 205
Marsden, David 261 National Research Development
Marseille 90–3, 98–9 Corporation (NRDC) (U.K.) 230
Marsh, Alan 264, 266 Nationalization
Marx, Karl American attitudes 203
attempted resuscitation of 30–4 England 12, 286–8
on class formation 40–2 public corporations as chosen form
debates with 19–25 of 288–91
on England 2, 265, 282–3 France 122–5
on France 87–8, 94, 106, 239 Neale, A.D. 193
Matthews, Donald 199 New class
McKean, Robert 58, 68–70 see Djilas, nomenklatura
McKibbin, Ross 2–5, 16, 220, 286 New York City 150, 163–8, 174–5,
Merchants 184, 189–91
in England 232–3, 248 Nicoud, Gèrard 114–15, 241
in Russia 56–9, 62 Nixon, Richard 156, 203
Middle class Nomenklatura 20–1, 28, 73–4, 85–6, 210
England v. elites in England 219–23
formation of 231–40 v. fonctionnaires in France 115, 118,
honour of 298–9 139–40
solidarity of 266 Norris-LaGuardia Act 1932 (1932)
France 172–3, 176, 180, 195
absence of 106, 111–13 Northcote-Trevelyan Report (1854)
substitutes of 114–15 237–8
U.S. Nurses, England 289, 312, 329–30
disbanding of 150–3
fleeting appearance of 152–3 O’Boyle, Leonore 280
vagueness of 154–6, 181, 185 Occupational prestige
Middletown (Muncie, Ind.) 179–82, measures of 26–30
196 Office of Economic Opportunity (U.S.)
Miliband, R. 287 147–8
Millerson, Geoffrey 266, 278 Oil refineries 300–3, 316, 336–7
Minitel (France) 126–7 Orlovsky, Daniel 55
Index 451
Orwell, George (Eric Blair) Practice-based, practitioner-controlled

on class in England 1, 6–11, training 266–9
14–16 see apprenticeship, vocational
on classlessness 322, 338, 341 training
on his own class 221 Présidents directeurs-généraux (PD-Gs)
on Soviet Russia 19–20 131–2, 136
Private schools
Palmerston, Lord H. 326 U.S. 197–8
Pantouflage 121, 128–36 Privatization
& pantoufleurs England 310–11, 320, 325
U.S. version of 193 France 125–6
Paris Russia 74, 86
Chamber of Commerce 129 Professions & professionalization
Commune 1871 87, 92–5 agents of class formation 40–2
Gas Company 133 v. entrepreneurs 240–4
intellectuals 275 v. intelligentsia 105–11, 275–82
June Days 1848 88 England
workers in 91–2, 95–6, 98–100 attacks on self-government of
Parkin, Frank 22–5 233–4
Patents change in work settings 340
in Britain v. U.S. 143 ethics of 298–9, 313, 324, 336
Peasants mass mobilization of 236–9
France 4 practice-based training of 266–7,
Imperial Russia 279–81
beginnings of class formation reform of 312–16, 320, 325, 329–36
62–3 France
commune legend & reality 59–60 impact of revolution on 106
obstacles to class formation 60–2 post-revolutionary development of
Soviet Russia 107–10, 113, 211
as official category 74–5 Germany 41
Pelloutier, Fernand 100 Russia 65–6
Perkin, Harold 267 U.S.
Peter the Great of Russia 49, 52, 56–8, colonial professions 141
63 later development of 153–6, 200
Philadelphia 150–2, 165, 168, post-revolutionary attacks on 150–3
190–1 Public housing
Pipes, Richard 50–3, 61, 67–8, 77 and class formation 38
Place, Francis 250 England v. U.S. 12
Plainville (U.S.) 182–3, 196 U.S. 147, 174, 204
Political parties Public ownership
as agents of class formation 19–21, see Nationalization
39 Public schools
as expressions of class interest 39 American 146, 153, 197
England 7, 216 see Labour Party English 219–22, 231, 241–2, 320, 326
France 97, 116
Russia 54, 62, 64, 67, 69, 74–5 see Quo warranto, writs of 215, 233–4, 239,
Bolsheviks 247, 278, 325
U.S. 149, 153, 164, 187, 192
Polsby, Nelson 188–9, 193, 202, Raeff, Marc 49, 51, 53, 63–4
227 Railways, France v. England & U.S.
Poujade, Pierre 114, 241 121–2
452 Index
Rayton, Dwight 257–8 Sewell, W.H. 90–3, 98–9

Reed, Albert Z. 154 Shadwell, Arthur 157
Reform Act (U.K.) 1832 218, 232 Sheffield 246–8, 255
Respect agenda, U.K. 341 Sherman, John (Senator) 192
Revolution & Sherman Act 172, 193–6, 204,
& civil society 208, 306–7 274
American, distinctive characteristics Shonfield, Andrew 122–4, 128–9, 132
of 142–3 Skilled workers 42
English England 28, 248, 251–7, 263–8, 289,
Glorious 1688–89 88–9, 215–16, 292, 297–302, 328, 336–7
232–5, 242 France 88–91, 99–101, 119
Puritan 1642–49 214–15, 246 ratios to unskilled compared 260
French Russia 66–9
of 1830 93 U.S. 156–7, 164–5, 172, 180, 184,
of 1848 88, 90–4, 96, 106 308, 311
Great Revolution 1789–1799 Slavery in U.S. 148, 159–61, 164
as social capital & script 93–5, Smith, Adam 261
99–105 Smith, S.A. 80
National Revolution 1940 112, Smith, W. Rand 104
123 and see Paris, Commune Social mobility
Russian comparative studies of 9–11, 21,
of 1905 54, 62, 66, 71 26–30, 33–4
of 1917 67–8, 71–2, 82 in England & Britain 16–17, 267,
Ringen, Stein 17 291–4
Roberts, Ken 223–4 in France 107, 115–18, 130
Rouen 92 in Russia 23
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 331 U.S. 187–91, 197–200
Royal Commission on Universities Social order in England, pillars of
1850–52 (Eng) 326–7 338–9
Royal Society (U.K.) 278–9 Socialist-Revolutionaries (Russia) 62,
Rule, John 249–50 74–5
Ruling class, attempts to identify Society for the Promotion of
England 217–31 Engineering Education (U.S.) 154
France 115–40 Solicitors (England) 236, 239, 243,
Russia 49–51, 55, 72–4, 81, 305 see 266–7, 270, 336
Djilas & Orwell Soslovie, sosloviia (estates) 58, 83–4
U.S. 187–206 Stalin 73, 77, 80, 82, 118
see also Aristocracy in England, Stanley, David 198
Integration of elites, Nomenklatura States as agents of class formation &
Ruttenberg, Stanley 178 dissolution 36–8, 209–10, 304–10
see Civil society and passim
St. Etienne 92, 121, 126 Statute of Artificers 1653, England
Sale of Office 248, 251–4, 272, 297
in England & France 119 Stendhal (Beyle, M.H.) 276
see Monopolies, England 232 Stevens, Thaddeus 46
Sartori, Giovanni 39, 321 Strikes
Savage, Dean 130–1 England (& Britain) 244, 249–50,
Savage, Mike 26, 37, 292 255, 259–61, 283, 287, 299–300,
Scientific Management 312, 316, 320, 324, 328, 337
England 330–1 France 89–93, 100–4, 111–12
France 256 Russia 68–70, 78, 80–1
Index 453
Scotland 299 Union des Chefs des Entreprise (UN-ICER)

U.S. 161, 165–71, 173–6 115
Sunday Times, ‘Rich List’ 224 United Nobility 54
Sweden 11–12, 31–4, 294 Universities
England 215, 222, 234, 268, 273,
Table of Ranks 49–52, 58, 65–6, 73–4 276, 281, 311, 325–7, 331, 338
Taine, Hippolyte 275 France 130, 137
Tawney, R.H. 219 Russia 22, 64, 70, 76
Taylor, F.W. 330 U.S. 144, 151, 154, 159, 198–9, 202
Technical training Useem, Michael 201
England preference for practice-based
266–9 Vichniac, Judith 256
reform of 314–15 see Vichy regime 110, 112, 123
Apprenticeship Vocational training see Apprenticeship,
France, pioneer of school-based 119 Technical Training
in U.S. scarcity of 156–7 Vogel, David 204–5
Temperley, S.R. 259–60
Tennessee Valley Authority 288 Wagner Act 1935 (U.S.) 173–5, 176, 180
Thatcher, Mrs & her governments 7, Watson Thomas Sr & Jr 194
13, 16, 44, 125, 230, 274, 287, 296, Webb, Sydney & Beatrice 250, 273, 277
310–38 West, James 182–3
Thompson, E.P. 36, 44, 46, 166–7, White, Albert 213, 269, 271
244, 250, 263 Whittaker, D.H. 293
Tocqueville, Alexis de Wilentz, Sean 165–71, 174
on France 1848 94 Wilkinson, Rupert 220–1
on U.S. 160, 187, 205–6 Wilks, Stephen 228–30
Toulouse 89–90, 92 Williams, Raymond 212
Trade societies & unions Williamson, Jeffrey 13
as agents of class formation 39–41 Wobblies see the IWW
England 244–54, 263–5, 272–3, Working class
282–6, 288–303, 311–12, American
314–20 absence of enduring class
France 96–105, 109, 123–4 institutions 179–87
Russia, Imperial 66–72 surges of solidarity and
Soviet 77–8 consciousness 164–79
U.S. 162–8, 172–6, 180–6 British, research on 7–11
Trade union transition elite to mass English
England 263–4 compared with middle class 262–9
France 99–101 early organization of 244–51
Russia 77–8 separates from middle class 251–4
U.S. 165, 172–9 French
Trade Union Congress (TUC) 263–4, adapts revolutionary form of action
282–5, 289 99–105
Traugott, Mark 88 predates industrialization 87–93
Tribunals, industrial & employment in social capital of 93–9
U.K. 312 of Imperial Russia
Trow, Martin 142, 145, 322, 326, beginnings of 66–72
333 of Soviet Russia
Turner, Frederick Jackson 159–60 absence of class characteristics 77–81
Turner, H.A. 255–6, 261 compared with predecessors &
Turner, R.H. 292 successors 80–1
454 Index
Workingmen peculiarities of English 258,

in U.S. v. working class 186 260–2
Workingmen’s parties (U.S.) 149, 165 Wright, Erik Olin 24, 30–4, 46, 187, 294
Workplaces
English & French compared 132–4, Zeldin, Theodore 4
254–62 Zemstva 54, 62, 64–5, 70, 83
English & Japanese compared 293 Ziegler, Rolf 226
French & Japanese compared Zola, Emile 110
135–6 Zubatov, Sergei 71, 81

Class Formation Civil

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Class Formation Civil

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Class Formation, Civil

Society and the State

REVOLUTION AND THE MAKING OF THE CONTEMPORARY LEGAL PROFESSION

Chapter 6 Civil Society Acts Alone in the United States 141

Why no one answered Orwell

rather lamely, to unnamed foreigners, who had, he assured us, ‘regularly

England in cross-national surveys

England only 35%.’27 To anyone familiar with the sociology of education

‘Downward mobility may be more indicative of social ﬂuidity than upward

inequalities continued to increase. In the same decade, the displacement of

income, like Australia and Scandinavia, which they distinguished from

Questions and clues arising

This review of some of the cross-national evidence apparently relevant to

evidence head-on, or simply dismissed it, on the grounds that there is

Wall of China is to bricklaying, or the Sphinx of Cheops to sandcastles.

Djilas’s theory of a ‘new class’

The ﬁrst theoretical contribution which deserves attention is that of

Post-Marxist theories in Britain

Dahrendorf was the ﬁrst academic sociologist to react to Djilas’s essay.

explain economic, social and political differences in these societies’, but

Comparison via correlation coefﬁcients in the United States

Over the same period as these post-Marxist discussions were unfolding in

great deal of weight must be given to the cross-national similarities in

lesson we drew from our consideration of the structural approaches of the

A bold step backwards

however, was not at all discouraged by such considerations, and even

The ﬁrst step in devising a framework of comparative analysis must be to

The two agents of class formation

solution of classes and their effectiveness in doing so over time. Moreover,

more likely, of course, if they decline to address themselves to a particular

solidarity would require the elimination of occupational solidarity, a pro-

this process has often been assumed to be natural or automatic, it is worth

Both consistently sought to dismantle national bargaining structures erected

How will we identify classes?

that has never displayed any inter-occupational, inter-regional or inter-

there is documentary evidence of a collective awareness and collective

but simply from the juxtaposition and re-consideration of long-familiar,

The ofﬁcial classes of Imperial Russia

The basic criterion of social differentiation in Imperial Russia, the great

served as such. Wallace described chinovniki as ‘a peculiar kind of class’.8

converted themselves into commercial farmers, often with the help of

house of the legislature – and from relatives, sympathetic ofﬁcials and

Catherine, who similarly hoped to encourage an indigenous bourgeoisie,

settings, such as mines, factories and foundries, and on non-Russians in the

continuous interest in its proceedings – public readings of newspapers in

And the unofﬁcial ones formed in civil society

little information about their membership or duration.85 It seems certain,

Much of the evidence thought to describe the emergence of a working class

the more proletarian workers in the gigantic ‘Fordist’ factories in Neva,

is surely enough to demonstrate the beginnings of a working class. Russian

unions and self-governing professions, and unintentionally provided

Continuities in the management of stratiﬁcation in Soviet

In his account of the revolution, published in 1935, Chamberlin referred

innocent activities, such as stamp-collecting clubs or artely, the small vol-

The class privileges of the nomenklatura were noticed by Nikita Khrushchev,

Revolutionaries, the political party most closely identiﬁed with peasants’

successor is no less relevant and illuminating. If the Soviet regime had

Classes in the two Russias compared

Despite the abolition of private property and of hereditary nobility, we

vocabulary of social hierarchies, and to accept market-induced contra-

the distribution of rewards and privileges, and to enforce a monopoly of

movement of industrial labour, and this, as Filtzer argued, ‘fundamentally

committed itself to the prodigious administrative effort of distinguishing

On the grounds that comparison best proceeds by considering cases that