Page 55 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

44 MOORE, ANDERSON AND ENGLISH SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

solved very early and very completely. The early, powerful, successful and
pervasive bourgeois thrust in land, commerce, industry, politics (and even
ideology) is the key to English social development.
It is worth stressing that Moore’s view is very close to what might be called
the ‘classic’ Marxist version. It is the main line which informs Edward
Thompson’s critique of Perry Anderson. He stresses the deeply bourgeois
character of the English gentry, even to their town-dwelling, the centuries-old
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capitalist presence and ‘the great arch of bourgeois culture’. Perhaps the most
striking formulations are Poulantzas’s, for he is, in some respects, inclined to
Anderson’s positions. Although he uses the term ‘feudal’ in describing some
aspects of English society since the seventeenth century, he stresses the success
of the bourgeois revolution in England, the thoroughness of the whole transition
to capitalism: ‘The British revolution was particularly successful in that it allows
the open domination of the CMP [capitalist mode of production] over the other
modes of production in the social formation. This open domination brings it
about that the matrix of this mode of production decisively permeates this
formation.’ He compares this with the French situation, where the domination of
the capitalist mode of production was less complete. The consequences were the
persistence of peasant agriculture and small-scale industry, the need politically to
accommodate peasantry and petit bourgeoisie and hence the marked instability
of bourgeois rule. 21
The argument here is very similar indeed to Moore’s, if much more schematic.
Behind both (openly in Poulantzas, more covertly in Moore) stand Marx’s
original formulations. For it is easy to trace these arguments to his journalistic
work on mid nineteenth century England and his analyses in Class Struggles in
France and the Eighteenth Brumaire. He pointed the difference most succinctly:
‘while the old bourgeoisie fights the French Revolution, the new one conquers the
world market’. 22
Moore’s treatment of ‘freedom’ is much less convincing. ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘did
the process of industrialization in England culminate in the establishment of a
relatively free society?’ His answer is phrased both in terms of the legacy from
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a violent past and in terms of specifically nineteenth-century developments. The
legacy included strong parliamentary institutions adapted to the peaceful solution
of social conflict, a relatively weak repressive state apparatus, an adaptive,
landed upper class that did not need to resist the ‘advance of industry’ and, of
course, no ‘peasant problem’. Yet nineteenth-century progress in liberalism was
by no means inevitable. From 1790 to about 1822 English society passed through
a ‘reactionary phase’. This did not amount to Halevy’s ‘reign of terror’ but
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marked a break with liberalism. Why was the phase so short-lived? In part the
legacy, including cutting off the head of a tyrannous king, did not supply the
materials. But since repression can be improvised (and was), this explanation is
inadequate. The key, according to Moore, was that landed upper-class and
industrial bourgeoisie had no permanent, structural need for repression. The
former did not need to hold down a rebellious peasantry, for it had already