Page 58 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 47

of nineteenth-century society and, not least, to ‘bourgeois’ (or aristocratic)
freedoms. It is arguable that it was not so much middle-class agitation or the
amateur culture of aristocracy that made England ‘relatively free’ but a plebeian
agitation and culture, or, more accurately still, the friction of all three. If space
allowed, this could be demonstrated in several critical areas: in the actual
achievement of parliamentary democracy (as opposed to a wholly propertied
parliamentary system); in the liberty of the press and of public meeting, both
freedoms being won or maintained by popular exercise; and, not least, in the
stemming of a very real impulse to a bureaucratic state, signalled in the popular
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defeat of the full Chadwickian programme of Poor Law reform. Certainly, in
the early nineteenth century, working-class movements seem to have been the
main bearers of the notions of natural and civic rights.
This does not, of course, solve the problem, unfairly fathered on Moore, of
how the popular challenge was contained. We shall return to it, in a quite
different guise, later. In the meantime it is worth noting that a part of the answer
is contained, as so often in this extremely rich book, in another part of the story.
For in a later chapter Moore presents us with a critique of both conservative
historiography and the idealist conception of culture. It is a pity these dimensions
did not inform his English history—particularly in this passage:

The assumption of inertia, that cultural and social continuity do not require
explanation, obliterates the fact that both have to be recreated anew in each
generation, often with great pain and suffering. To maintain and transmit a
value system human beings are punched, bullied, sent to jail, thrown in
concentration camps, cajoled, bribed, made into heroes, encouraged to read
newspapers, stood up against a wall and shot and sometimes even taught
sociology. To speak of cultural inertia is to overlook the concrete interests
and privileges that are served by indoctrination, education and the entire
complicated process of transmitting culture from one generation to the
next. 32
It is quite true that in nineteenth-century England there was more bribing,
cajoling, making of heroes, supplying newspapers and teaching in schools than
the more brutally repressive alternatives. Political economy was taught, not
sociology. Also ideology and a cultural control had deeper roots and a more
organic origin than Moore’s mere accumulation of apparatuses might suggest.
Yet, to say it again, it is just this dimension that ought to have informed Moore’s
English story—and did not.
As we have seen, the key note of the ‘classic’ Marxist version of English social
development is success—success of a peculiarly early and complete capitalist
transformation and the masked political success of the English bourgeoisie under
nineteenth-century conditions. The Nairn and Anderson version centres, by
contrast, on failures, failures of the modern social classes. The first and most
determining feature is a characteristic and abiding relationship between the