Page 53 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

42 MOORE, ANDERSON AND ENGLISH SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

14
growth of parliamentary democracy. No bourgeois, no democracy’. Thus, at
the risk of punching a hole in his thesis, he accommodates the dominant class of
modern times within his histories. The bourgeoisie becomes, indeed, ‘the
principal actor’. If one adds (as Moore also acknowledges) that the impulse to
commercialize agriculture, the first move in the chain of causation, also owes
much to bourgeois trade, transport and urban markets, the way is open to a major
simplification of his case. A simpler equation now reads: early capitalism equals
democracy. But if this blunts, rather, Moore’s revisionism, it does not undermine
the value of his thesis in constructing a more complete model.
Finally, in a running scrap with Conservative apologetics, Moore insists that
revolutionary violence is creative. Popular violence checks royal absolutism in
England and France; the American Civil War—‘a bloody gash across the
15
whole record’ —guarantees, by destroying the plantation system, a democratic
form of American capitalism. Violence is especially important in France, finely
poised in the eighteenth century at the entry-point to different routes. The ancien
régime showed features which elsewhere proved antithetical to democracy: a
weak industrial bourgeoisie; a middle and upper class parasitic upon the court; a
very strong form of royal absolutism; a large peasant class only partially
emancipated from feudal entanglements in systems of agriculture lying between
English agrarian capitalism and the estates of Eastern Europe. Hence the
necessity (for democracy) of a violent revolution, ‘bourgeois’ in that it removed
inhibitions to capitalism and democracy, but pushed on in its destructive work by
the radicalism of peasants and sans culottes. Hence, too, once bourgeois and
wealthier peasant reaction had checked the revolutionary impulse, the extreme
vulnerability of French democratic institutions. 16
It seems valid to test Moore’s thesis by examining one route in more detail, so
long as the inquiry turns on ‘grand facts’ and not on petty corrections. Viewed
like this, broadly, Moore’s English route is the nearest thing to a success story in
a pessimistic book. The success is twofold: for capitalism and for ‘freedom’.
England is the paradigmatic case of capitalist democracy. Let us look at each
aspect of ‘success’ in turn.
Moore shows that by the early nineteenth century all the major historical
inhibitions to capitalism and the rule of capitalist classes had been swept away.
Feudalism and feudal nobility were long dead, checked by monarchy, eroded by
commercialization, replaced by ‘peasant’ or small producer or, later, by the
classic English forms of agrarian capitalism—landlord, tenant, labourer. By the
eighteenth century the English gentry were a thoroughly capitalist class. In the
next one hundred years or so they completed the transformation of countryside
by destroying, through the legal violence of enclosure, what was left of peasant
agriculture. They thus removed from the historical agenda the problems of
peasant rebellion or peasant inertia. Finally, the characteristic English alliance of
landed/ mercantile capital developed in opposition to the Crown, weakening it
and, with it, the whole apparatus of the state. By 1800 neither monarchy (nor