Page 57 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

46 MOORE, ANDERSON AND ENGLISH SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

by his failure fully to absorb the argument of The Making of the English Working
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Class, but it is also related to his attenuated notion of capitalism and the
neglect of the problem of class control. One consequence is that he accepts much
too readily the rather assured portrayal, out of ruling-class sources, of ruling-
class dilemmas conveyed in the quite Whiggish English historians whose work
he uses, notably Kitson Clark, Woodward, Mather, Namier and
F.M.L.Thompson. This portrayal is deeply embedded in the historical and
political cultures and is not easily penetrated—especially, perhaps, by an
American Anglophile. So having stressed past violence, having broken with
Whiggish assumptions to that extent, he accepts, with only a hint of parody, the
usual combinations of ‘moderate and intelligent statesmen’, ‘legislation to
improve the condition of the poor’, the Whig devotion to the ‘ideal of liberty’
and even, if he does not indeed intend a parody, the ‘age of peaceful
transformation when parliamentary democracy established itself (sic!) and
broadened down from precedent to precedent’. These formulations are not helped
by the failure to analyse ‘parliamentary democracy’, both as a concept in liberal
political science and as a concrete form of the state. One realizes with a sense of
shock that Moore’s question about England (and, indeed, one part of his whole
problematic) is phrased within a Whiggish tradition. His question is about
England’s relative ‘freedom’. A more penetrating question, which nonetheless
accepts his as a premise, might run as follows: ‘Since in England both the
coercive and bureaucratic apparatuses of state power were (for good historical
reasons) rather weak, how was a particularly strong popular challenge
contained?’
The problem is not posed because the class to which it refers is given, in the
theory and in the historiography, no active role. The absence starts with the
historical precursors of the working class. Moore implies a passivity in the
English populace both before and during the Industrial Revolution. The vigorous
resistances of Edward Thompson’s artisans, weavers, labourers and petit
bourgeois radicals are largely overlooked, much more so than across the
Channel, where their incursions seem more spectacular. Moore’s ‘peasants’ are
purely victims. And this is a very important omission indeed. For it means that
he greatly underestimates the difficulty of managing a popular resistance and
transforming the inherited culture of proletarianized groups. This in turn bears
upon early nineteenth-century uses of the state and thence on the English
potential for a reactionary or a bureaucratic adaptation. Moore underestimates
this possibility and he therefore finds it too easy to explain why it did not occur.
So the early working class is easily disciplined ‘with a minimum of help from the
state’. Chartism makes a rather routine appearance, presenting an alien threat of
violence, but is treated with lenience. One wonders what happened in all this to
‘rural police’, new Poor Law, Education Department, spy system and army of the
north.
Against the familiar stereotypes one should insist that the new working-class
presence was determining. It not only made itself but contributed to the making