In the German case there are many reasons to reject the notion that the Bismarckian state should be seen as a vehicle of bourgeois power. Not only does such a view put out of account Bismarck’s own sense that his whole political project revolved around an effort – highly successful in all the ways we have seen – to curb whatever power bourgeois liberals had, it ignores the special kind of relationship between state and society the Bismarckian constitution established, and that was rooted in the earlier history of relations between German rulers and bürgerliche Gesellschaft. David Blackbourn himself recognizes this in a later writing. Taking note of the changes in tariff policy Bismarck used as part of his rightward shift at the end of the 1870s, he acknowledges that the Prussian Chancellor did not become the tool of the big industrialists who demanded protection for their goods: in order to safeguard consumers the tariffs were set lower than the representatives of heavy industry wished, and “any special privileges enjoyed by heavy industry have to be set against the larger context of government support for the industrial economy as a whole. This was the old idea of the state as representative of the ‘general interest,’ now cast in a more modern idiom. State and bureaucracy aimed to stand above and harmonize the conflicting interests, not to make concessions to any one group that would jeopardize that goal.”53 The creation of standardized law codes that extended uniform citizenship rights and protected property had long been part of this project.
In the perspective proposed here the questions to which “hegemony” and “national modalities of bourgeois revolution” are answers simply do not arise. We never need to ask how it comes about that bourgeois gain power under modern conditions, because both the power they possess and the limits to which it remains subject are inherent in the development of modernity from the start. Modernity unfolds as networks of means grow more extensive and thicker, drawing everyday social relations into distant connections and generating new forms of power, economic, political, and cultural; these alter life for society as a whole but they are distributed among individuals and groups in accord with their various capacities for directing or drawing on the resources that flow within them. As participants in such networks bourgeois of many stripes enjoy advantages over other categories of people, because their occupations – business, public administration, developing and diffusing knowledge and skills that are based on it – involve participation in networks more or less extended in space that provide experience of the mediations social action increasingly requires. If “hegemony” means the spread of values and attitudes originally identified with the middle classes to others, it has one main root in this overall fit between bourgeois life and modernity. But the actual effect of this correspondence differs according to the nature of particular networks and their degree of development, as the special benefits workers’ associations derived from late nineteenth-century party organization testify. The same spreading involvement of society as a whole in distant relations that gave rise to new sources of bourgeois power simultaneously provided those who were not bourgeois with materials and energies to contest and limit it.
Part II Calculations and lifeworlds
8 Time, money, capital
Time and money form a dyad often invoked in connection with both bourgeois life and modernity. To be sure, neither belongs exclusively to any social formation or historical moment, taking on different forms and playing different roles in particular periods and places. We will see in this chapter that ways of measuring time and the forms taken on by money both developed in tandem with other topics being considered there, taking a marked and significant turn after the middle of the nineteenth century as a consequence of the deepening impact of distant relations in practically every realm of life. In order to make the importance of this turning still clearer the current chapter looks at parallels between money’s history and that of banking and finance, and concludes by considering the historical trajectory that has been attributed to one particular form of money, the one Marx sought to analyze in Capital.
Widening webs and the ordering of time
Whether it merits being called “natural” or not, the way of measuring time in Europe before the later Middle Ages (and in most other parts of the world) was less abstract than the one we know today, since it allowed the length of hours to fluctuate in accord with the longer or shorter period of daylight between sunrise and sunset. On sundials, for instance, each hour represented a given proportion of the total (a tenth or twelfth in most cases) regardless of the season. By contrast, modern “clock time” establishes days and hours of constant length, all divided into standard minutes and seconds, maintaining these regularities regardless of variations in daylight. Until fairly recently a number of historians attributed the turn to the more modern way of reckoning hours to merchants, concerned to use their own time and that of their employees in a disciplined and efficient way, in contrast to rural people whose lives were regulated by seasonal changes, and the Church, whose schedule of prayers and rituals made reference to the rhythms of the solar day. But closer attention, notably by the German historian Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, has revealed a different pattern.
Among the first seekers of mechanisms that could measure hours and minutes of equal length were astronomers and astrologers, wishing to calculate the movements of stars and planets; but technical advances were tied more closely with the use of clocks that could strike bells in monasteries and churches. Religious orders employed these at least from the thirteenth century as wake-up calls, sending monks to work and prayer on a schedule not governed by the vagaries of the sun; it was here that escapement mechanisms were devised that, by dint of much trial and error, allowed for more regular measurement of time itself. Churches found such improvements attractive not for precision’s sake, but because mechanical clocks that could be counted on to perform some action on a regular schedule could become a vehicle for announcing services and attracting worshipers. Set up in towers, the clocks controlled complex displays: at stated hours a procession of figures, monks or the three Magi or the Virgin Mary and saints, would emerge and traverse some visible space, sometimes accompanied by animals and noises, or by skeletons as a memento mori. (Similar shows are recorded in classical sources, and they were produced, mostly using water-clocks, in the Islamic world as well.) Such extravaganzas were used, as officials acknowledged, “to lure people into church, to astound them, and thus to strengthen the authority of the Church.” Some of them can still be seen in various towns and cities today.1
Set-ups of this sort spread rapidly from place to place beginning in the mid fourteenth century, especially in cities. Merchants as such, however, played no special role in diffusing them, nor did the Church or princely governments resist it. Prestige and a fascination for technical wonders often provided reasons for investing in such mechanisms, but the chief motive for regularizing the hour seems to have been administrative efficiency, and in particular the need to coordinate activities. Territorial rulers promoted the use of clocks in various parts of their domains for a variety of festive, admonitory, or practical reasons, for instance to designate the specific hour at which some event had occurred – a crime, a birth, a contract – or was to take place. Administrative ambitions, whether realized or not, were evident in the purpose announced for the still visible Paris Palace Clock (Horloge du Palais) not far from Notre Dame, in a fourteenth-century document: “to promote the orderly running of the court [parlamenti curia] and the orderly life of the citizens.” Eighteenth-century German cameralist writers similarly declared that the accurate “division of time” was a way to coordinate “the great variety of businesses and the ordering of work and leisure.” Independent towns seem to have regarded clocks as instruments for encouraging councils and administrators to deal efficiently with the increasing quantity and range of matters they had to take up as population grew. None of these arrangements, however, either required or created pressure for places at a distance from each other to coordinate their chronometiric practices with others. Sund
ials remained in common use and many people still thought of the division of the day into parts as referring to the period of sunlight.2
What brought this complex state of affairs with its many local variations to a definitive end was the post-1850 transformation of transport and communication, which rapidly created a need to coordinate time measurement for people in widely dispersed locations; it had long been understood that mechanical clocks could provide this synchronicity, but only rail travel overcame the resistance of custom and local independence. In order for people to plan journeys involving connections between lines, operators and travelers in separate locations had to be able to know the time at every place in the system. Some kind of universal reference point provided the obvious solution, and as early as 1847 the time at the royal observatory in Greenwich (Greenwich Mean Time, formerly used chiefly as an aid in marine navigation) was adopted by all the railway companies in Great Britain, creating a standard “railroad time.” People who were not traveling did not need to use it, however, and local times were maintained (often at the insistence of town or village residents) for other purposes for some decades afterwards. Only in 1880, as the extension of the railroad network to many localities unconnected to it before brought the decline in the industrial and cultural regionalisms whose mid nineteenth-century importance was noted in Chapter 5, did GMT became the official time throughout Britain. By then a similar system had already been adopted in the United States (in 1874), followed by France in 1891 (which first declared Paris time to be universal throughout the country, adopting GMT as a reference point only in 1911), and by Germany in 1893 (where the Greenwich meridian was used as a benchmark right away). Only with these developments did hours become of equal length everywhere and throughout the year, putting an end to the practice of having the length of hours and the time at particular locations vary with the duration of daylight and thus with season and longitude.
This is not quite the whole story, however, and filling it in highlights the important point that it was the rising importance of distant connections, not technology as such, that belongs at its center. Well before the advent of railroads the expansion of government postal services led a number of states to impose the partial adoption of standard times in their territories. The Habsburgs, famous for their success in accumulating territories by marriage and other alliances, became pioneers in setting up rapid and centrally administered courier services from late in the sixteenth century. The system was intended to meet the needs of government and administration; what led officials to make the couriers available for private communications was the recognition that payments made by merchants could help to finance the operation. It was rulers and their aides who valued and sought ever-more rapid communication, since decisions were awaited on important matters (especially having to do with warfare) from a prince or other official who might be traveling between territories; by contrast the chief concern of early modern merchants seems to have been with reliability rather than speed, since most goods could not move quickly anyway. Sending official messages at a faster pace was the chief motive for instituting the system of “stages” or “posts,” in order to overcome the effects of fatigue on horses. As linkages between different routes became important (their numbers augmented by agreements between governments), it became still more imperative to maintain predictable schedules, since missing a connection might delay delivery until the next departure days or a week later. Such concerns mounted during the eighteenth century, as governments sought to establish greater unity in their territories and eliminate internal barriers to trade and movement; both Enlightenment culture and the emergence of “public opinion” owed much to these efforts (in which governments still remained central, as we have seen), as did the culture of letter writing (to which we will come later).
All these developments created pressures to coordinate time-measurements at diverse places along postal routes; governments did not demand that towns or cities give up their local divisions of the day, but some insisted that they establish at least one clock, usually at the post office, set to a standard time for the whole system (a goal aided by the spread of pendulum drives that greatly increased accuracy), so as to assure the least delay between couriers. By early in the nineteenth century the Prussian state was insisting that church-tower clocks be set to this standard as well. Given the depth of the transformation brought by train travel, Dohrn-van Rossum may be too quick to conclude from this that, “Already before the beginning of the age of the railroad, the ‘time of transport’ had rendered the ‘time of the cities’ obsolete.” Here as in the other topics we will consider in this chapter, things took on a recognizably “modern” shape only in the last decades of the nineteenth century. But even the possibility of such a conclusion highlights the point that involvement in distant connections was at least as important in bringing about the modern transformation of time measurement as were new forms of technology as such.3
Money and the social order: from private to public
Whatever else bourgeois life is about, it is surely about money, even if not solely in the ways most people ordinarily suppose. Our approach in this book takes Simmel’s analysis of money and the social relations it fosters as its starting point, but so far we have had little to say about money itself. And yet the history of money has much to tell us about the modernity that was taking shape during the nineteenth century. Simmel himself provides a revealing point from which to approach this history. In its developed modern form, he maintained, money is a public institution: the claims it makes on us, and we on it, derive from our shared position as members of a given social and political order. The assurance that money can always be exchanged for some other good of equal value is an implicit promise made to each individual by the whole community of people who accept and use a certain currency, so that every monetary transaction between individuals ties them to the community as a whole. The confidence people place in money is an expression of a more fundamental trust in the social order as an integrated entity, in its ability to sustain and regulate the relations with others through which we fulfill our needs and desires. Seen in this light, money is not just an instrument of exchange, but a form of socialization, “one of those relations whose presence transforms a sum of individuals into a social group, because ‘society’ is identical with the sum of those relations.” If having money gives us a sense of personal safety, the reason is not just that in it we possess something of “hard” value, but because our confidence in it is also a trust in the social order that sustains us as individuals. Conversely, fear that our money may not retain its value is anxiety about the continuing stability of that order; at moments of economic crisis (the Great Recession that began in 2007 is fresh in memory at this writing) even people whose own economic position may not be directly affected often experience anxiety and fear. These alternatives, together with the inequalities of wealth that money relations highlight, generate dissatisfaction and hostility toward money alongside this trust, but the latter feelings are further testimony to the involvement of all individuals in the social whole that money relations sustain. It is for these reasons that modern people have come to expect that money will be established and regulated by the state: “Money is less truly money to the degree that it is not guaranteed by the highest sociological sphere, in practice by its central organ.”4
Although Simmel’s characterization of money as a form of sociability may seem surprising, given the anti-social power it can clearly possess (and of which he was acutely aware), his association between money and public authority is likely to appear obvious or common-sensical to people whose experience of money has been formed in the West since late in the nineteenth century. But money has not always possessed such a clear public character; not only has its value often rested on something more concrete, it has also been guaranteed in more private ways. Taking this into account brings us back to a point made in Chapter 1 about the media that regulate access to networks of means, namely that they are at once abstract
and concrete, and that money is the paradigmatic examplar of this duality. Today we accept both paper notes, which are mere promises by some authority to guarantee their value, and metallic coins, survivals from an era when most or all money took the form of some actual material good. The paper currency is abstract money (although it too must take a concrete form), the metallic coins are concrete (although they too represent abstract values), containing a quantity of (say) gold, silver, or copper taken to be more or less equivalent to the value stamped on them. There is no need here to recount the long history of other materials that have served as money, animal, vegetable, and mineral, but it is necessary to recognize that such money forms need not (although they sometimes do) have the public character Simmel remarked. Private ones have often served where no such public authority could guarantee them, as well as in situations where people have lacked the confidence in government, and even in society as a whole, that Simmel saw as essential. In such situations, people have preferred to rely on material objects of value, or on persons they take to be more trustworthy than officials and rulers.
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 35