Miall’s language reminds us that many businessmen viewed their activity not as taking place in an independent sphere of pure economic relations, but as continuous with morality and religion. An older scholarship that emphasized the unalloyed individualism of economic enterprise in this period has given way to accounts that recognize entrepreneurship as closely woven into social and communal relations (I will have more to say about this in connection with the importance of family to individual well-being below).25 If we ask what class identity such relations imparted, “bourgeois” or “middle class” is one possible reply, but alongside it we need to keep in view the now mostly forgotten but once widespread categories of “industrious” or “producing” classes. The terms appeared in England from the 1760s; in the nineteenth century they bore a kinship to the French word industriels, dear to the Saint-Simonians: both comprised all those engaged in productive work. Because such terms located entrepreneurs and workers in a single category, they have often been rejected as ideological constructions, and indeed they could be employed to serve a particular interest, as can any social categories. But both the vocabulary and the values it expressed drew people together across class lines, just as religious values did. As one thoughtful historian of working-class culture and politics concludes,
Honesty, orderliness, punctuality, hard work and the refinement of manners and morals may all have been congruent with the industrial system and thus in the interest of the bourgeoisie but they were not therefore middle-class values. The great divisions in early nineteenth century society were not between the middle and the working classes but between the idle and the non-idle classes, between the rough and the respectable, between the religious and the non-religious … The Puritan ethic was … the ideology of those who worked as against those who did not.26
As we will now see, many of these same themes and relations reemerged in a different context once new-style political parties – and especially the liberals – appeared from the 1860s.
The advent of modern parties
The advent of modern political parties provided one of the grounds on which European countries came to resemble each other at the end of the nineteenth century. Resting on the suffrage extensions that vastly expanded electorates everywhere, the new parties took the form that has come to seem so natural since, in which some central organ oversees and is supported by a permanent network of local offices and committees set up to organize members, appeal to voters, and obtain financial support. The novelty of these organizations has sometimes been obscured, as Geoffrey Barraclough pointed out in some illuminating pages, by the usage that calls both older-style groupings and these more modern organizations by the same name.27 Earlier “parties,” such as British Whigs and Tories, or the Girondins and Jacobins of the French Revolution, were factions inside an assembly. A “party” might also consist of people who shared ideas and opinions and worked in concert for their spread or realization, but connections between such individuals were usually limited to correspondence or shared periodicals.28 Factions inside assemblies might have links to like-minded circles outside, but (with temporary exceptions such as the nexus of Jacobin clubs in 1790s France) not through an organized structure, and never to one with the ability to endure. Nationwide movements such as the Anti-Corn Law League, Chartism, and earlier the supporters of Wilkes in England, or the National Society that campaigned for unification in Germany during the 1850s and 1860s (like its Italian model) were single-issue pressure groups, disappearing with the victory or collapse of the cause they championed. Chartism’s absence of permanent structures was one reason why the movement could fade so quickly from the English political scene after 1848.During the revolutionary upheavals of the mid century political groupings intended to influence elections were organized in both France and Germany, and might have become permanent had the hopes of those years that governments responsible to voters and citizens would become regular features of politics been fulfilled; but they melted away with the revolutionary excitement that spawned them. The fall of the Bonapartist Empire in France, and Bismarck’s decision to introduce universal male suffrage in elections for the North German Confederation of 1867, and then for the Empire founded in 1871, re-established conditions for the growth of nationally organized parties on the continent; by then such groupings were already developing in England. All exhibited the more closely knit organization and the greater capacity for long survival provided by the more powerful networks of transportation and communication coming into prominence in the same years. Parties were not the only such organizations that now proliferated; alongside them emerged interest groups of many kinds, representing economic (agrarian, mercantile, manufacturing), professional, occupational, gender, cultural, or religious identities. But it was large-scale political associations that had the greatest impact.
It is a particular and defining feature of this period that it created the conditions under which working-class and socialist organizations grew large and powerful – without, however, bringing about the transformation for which many within them called. By the 1890s the German Social Democrats had become the country’s largest party (measured by votes in elections) and in 1912 they would achieve a plurality in the Reichstag; at the same time British workers were well on the way to setting up the independent forms of organization that freed them from earlier dependence on the liberals (the Labour Representation Committee, forerunner of the Labour Party, put its first representatives into Parliament in 1906), putting in motion the developments that would make Labour and not the liberals the chief alternative to the Conservatives after World War I; in France suspicion of electoral politics among socialists remained stronger than elsewhere, in accord with the country’s history of violent social conflict and presaging the later role of the Communist Left, but by the 1890s the socialists were obtaining considerable electoral success, aided by left-leaning bourgeois republicans, from whose ranks some of the main socialist leaders emerged.
These groupings gave expression to a widespread sense of exclusion and injustice on the part of workers in the period before 1914, and their prominence gave class divisions and antagonisms an unmistakable place in politics. But these conflicts no longer took the form they commonly assumed before 1850, and especially in the European-wide revolutions of 1848. Then it had appeared to many people, in every camp and social stratum, that workers could not become part of the existing political system without challenging and destabilizing it; now the evidence increasingly pointed in the opposite direction. Despite the continued presence within socialist parties of many who cherished visions of an imminent social transformation, and the continued appeal to revolution in official doctrine, the practice of party organizations became overwhelmingly reformist. These were the developments (amplified by the patriotic loyalty evinced by most socialists once the Great War broke out) that led Lenin to conclude in 1917 that “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism,” and Eric Hobsbawm – the most distinguished contemporary Marxist historian writing in English – to note more recently that “in the years between 1880 and 1914 ruling classes discovered that parliamentary democracy, in spite of their fears, proved itself to be quite compatible with the political and economic stability of capitalist regimes.” This revelation, he adds, was both “disappointing to revolutionaries” and quite at odds with what “either supporters or opponents” of bourgeois society mostly believed earlier in the century.29
So it was. All the same, these developments showed the capacity of bourgeois life to provide openings through which forces outside the middle classes could gain a share of social and political power. Together with national working class parties supranational labor organization gained stature and force too. The Second International, founded in 1889 and flourishing until the outbreak of World War I, represented the height of working-class internationalism, nurturing the hope that a new kind of society was in the offing. Both national and international socialist organizations relied on the railroad network
s and national newspaper press that facilitated the movement of leaders and ideas, overcoming (as Eugen Weber and Gérard Noiriel have noted) the isolation that had earlier separated workers in different regions. Newspapers printed in capital cities were quickly disseminated to other places, and some, notably the German Social-Democratic organ Die Neue Zeit, obtained an international readership; information about conflicts, strikes, meetings, and candidates for election was rapidly spread about, and the European-wide reputations acquired by leaders such as Karl Kautsky, Keir Hardie, and Jean Jaurès contributed to their ability to give direction to their own parties. Thus there existed a close “relationship between technological progress and the methods of communication and propaganda open to socialist theorists and leaders.”30 The same could be said in regard to their liberal and conservative rivals; indeed, as James Sheehan notes, these conditions were hardly less important in fostering the new kind of party organization than was suffrage extension itself. Before democratic politics could draw in people who had no prior experience of it, “large sections of the population had to become convinced that participation in electoral politics had some connection with their lives,” an evolution already underway in England but that on the continent (and especially in Germany) depended on new networks of communication and the messages passed along them.31
The reasons why the advent of modern parties had these effects were many. The influence that reformist ideas and practices gained within organized working-class groups owed much to the expanding economy’s ability to provide a larger quantity and a wider range of consumer goods, together with the generally rising curve of real wages that marked the period from 1850 until nearly the outbreak of the War. But two other more strictly political circumstances were at play too. The conditions under which “parties” operated before the 1860s were ones that favored groupings of people who could bring significant personal resources to them: sufficient wealth to be able to devote time and funds (for travel or correspondence) to participation, status in local communities and connections to similar people outside, literacy and some knowledge of people and conditions beyond their localities. We will see below that under these circumstances liberal parties in particular were chiefly collections of “notables,” people with reputation and standing in some particular place; the dependence of political participation on such standing was one reason why political positions were fairly often passed down from fathers to sons. Modern parties by contrast were able to link together and empower people who had few personal resources to bring to them, since the generally available means of communication and transport allowed them to disseminate information and draw people into common activities whether these members possessed the kinds of assets that were important earlier or not. Given the much larger numbers to which workers’ organizations could appeal, even quite small individual contributions could provide sufficient funds to meet expenses. Some workers made careers inside party organizations; for them as for others these conditions meant, as Hobsbawm puts it, that “it was the party that made the notable,” rather than the other way round.32
To this we need to add a second political advantage of working-class parties in this period, namely the depth of the divisions within the middle classes that efforts to establish modern parties revealed. In every country the projects advanced by some liberals to represent middle-class or bourgeois interests found barriers in the impossibility of giving unity to a part of society that remained especially fragmented and splintered. Liberals were not alone in experiencing a “crisis” in this period; the split between reformists and revolutionaries was recognized as one for socialists too. But working-class groupings were better able to forge a common basis for action than their bourgeois counterparts, who in addition were divided between those who saw politics in terms of class and those for whom liberalism was a vehicle for transcending it. These factors will be examined in different national contexts in this and the next two chapters.
Party organization, middle-class politics, and the coming of the “new liberalism”
As the only country where a central representative body with real power was an ongoing feature of politics, England developed the earliest effective party organizations. Their growth was fostered by the provisions of the 1832 Reform Bill noted earlier, in particular the listings of qualified voters created in order to administer the broader and more uniform suffrage; these provided local party committees with a basis on which to identify people over whom to seek influence. Before the second franchise extension in 1867, however, party loyalties were not grounded in organization of the later sort; in particular the great mid century leaders Gladstone and Disraeli first achieved their preeminence on the basis of their direct personal appeal to newly enfranchised voters. As John Vincent observes in his classic study of the Liberal Party and its voters, the followings acquired by the famous politicians of the era “were all achievements in the realm of sentiment.” The Party was less a formal organization than “a habit of cooperation and a community of sentiment”; the enthusiasm and loyalty of its voters owed more to “the novelty of participation in politics” than to “attachment to programme or doctrine.” Social conflicts had as yet little impact on national politics, in part because they were still largely “absorbed within a local situation” (the same was true in France) and in part because Gladstone, drawing on a rhetoric rooted in religious Dissent, was able to represent both moral seriousness and (especially as modern industry advanced after 1850) material progress. This combination had much to do with the appeal the Liberal Party made to working-class voters; from the onset of Gladstone’s leadership in the 1850s and 1860s to near the end of the century, most workers gave their support in elections to liberals. “The massive development of party loyalties throughout the country preceded any corresponding full development of party organization by almost a generation.”33
This later turn began in the 1870s, the decade when both liberals and conservatives constructed elaborate electoral machines, with local committees and chapters integrated into centrally controlled party structures. In both cases, but especially the liberal one, the more formal and mediated kind of organization was favored as a way to provide a substitute for the old politics of deference. The liberal efforts began in Birmingham, where Joseph Chamberlain (a manufacturer who was the town’s mayor and later became an important figure in national politics, eventually becoming a conservative) and his associates set up a committee soon copied elsewhere, and which took the American name “Caucus.” Its activities included choosing candidates and working for their election through meetings, pamphlets, and canvassing. From the start both a strength and a problem of the Caucus was that it represented a radical faction inside the Liberal Party, consisting of people opposed both to the old gentlemanly style of the Whigs and to their moderation in policy. The Caucus played a role (how important has been disputed) in one of the first truly national election campaigns, Gladstone’s “Midlothian Campaign” of 1879. But its radical spirit made for tense relations with the National Party, leading to a crisis when Gladstone announced his conversion to Home Rule (that is autonomy) for Ireland in 1886, a policy that many in the radical wing, Chamberlain among them, opposed for reasons to which we will come in a moment. Gladstone’s influence and prestige was sufficient to carry the majority in the Caucus along with him, however, and this allowed it to draw closer to the official Party, from which many prominent radicals who shared Chamberlain’s views on Ireland now withdrew (becoming “Liberal Unionists,” that is, supporters of keeping Ireland united to Britain). At this point the Caucus organization moved its headquarters from Birmingham to London, and merged with the National Liberal Federation, making clear its role as an agency of the Party.
On the conservative side, local associations in support of candidates had grown up from the mid 1830s, but the impetus to central organization came from national Party figures. Sir Robert Peel had urged Tories to organize in the 1840s, and after 1867 Disraeli, convinced that conservatives had the power to
compete with liberals for working-class votes (it was he who put through the “leap in the dark” of the Second Reform Bill), assigned the task of encouraging and uniting local associations to one of his lieutenants. But it was younger figures acting after Disraeli’s death in 1881, notably Randolph Churchill, who created the structures through which the Party sought to give practical substance to Disraeli’s vision of “popular Toryism,” through a network of local chapters of the “Primrose League,” at once a political and social organization (named after Disraeli’s favorite flower). As with the liberals, tensions surfaced between an older, more strictly aristocratic vision of the Party and a more populist one that sometimes inspired sharp criticism of its traditional orientation and leaders, but these were resolved with less conflict than in the liberals’ case. By the late 1880s the Primrose League had become an important presence in many localities, spreading an image of Conservatism as open to the needs of ordinary people and able to enter into their concerns, and providing an efficient engine of electoral organization and fund-raising.34 In certain ways its manner of generating support went beyond its liberal rivals; through its social events and use of symbols such as the Primrose itself, it provided the elements of a culture of conservatism infused into daily life by threads of activity in which sentiment and political calculation were deeply entwined.35
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