Page 65 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

54 MOORE, ANDERSON AND ENGLISH SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

marshal an even stronger case than that proposed by Edward Thompson against
the view of continued ‘aristocratic’ hegemony. What follows is an attempt to
recreate more accurately the peculiar sources of strength of the English
bourgeoisie, concentrating on the pre-monopolist period and relations between
the landed and industrial fractions.
The agrarian-capitalist legacy was undoubtedly very important. Throughout
most of the nineteenth century one finds coexisting within the same state two
rather different kinds of social formation. These cohered around agrarian and
industrial capital, the former in relative decline but in a flourishing state until the
last decades of the century, the latter economically predominating. At first these
two kinds of capital were perfectly complementary, since both capitalist
agriculture and capitalist industry needed to create ‘free labour’ by transforming
a rural social structure. In the long term they were, as Marx argued, likely to
converge in the shape of ‘agricultural industry’, in which land would become a
commodity like any other. In the meantime there were, it is true, some real
antagonisms, but these were largely resolved (and resolved early) in favour of
industrial capital.
Yet the estate, however capitalistically farmed, remained a different kind of
unit of production from the business. There are numerous passages in Marx’s
writings where he examines this difference. One of the most revealing
formulations is also an early one: ‘Landed property in its distinction from capital
is private property—capital—still afflicted with local and political prejudices.’ 49
This catches perfectly the position of estate and landowners. For the estate had a
value much more than economic value, more than could be cashed on the
market. It carried a stock of status, the ‘deference’ (or anyway the voting power)
of tenantry, and an enormous stock of cultural capital and of leisure. These assets
derived from the internal character of landed capital. Through his intermediary,
the tenant farmer, the owner of ground rent won both money and time, cash and
leisure, for all the gentry’s political functions: conspicuous consumption,
ideological show (Edward Thompson’s ‘theatre’), amateur justice, all kinds of
patronage and, of course, politics at the centre. Around the estate system were
also preserved all kinds of social values that were alien to industrial capital but
not antithetical to it—much of the whole conservative/Anglican repertoire,
rooted not in ‘feudalism’ but in the genuinely hegemonic system of class-cultural
relations which we might call ‘gentry paternalism’. The conservative repertoire
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continued to be reproduced not merely on the estates themselves but within a
whole set of social institutions created in the days when landed wealth was king.
The most important of these was the Anglican Church, always rurally centred,
never wholly adapting to city, yet having a near-monopoly of formal education
at most levels and undergoing quite a marked organizational and theological
revival in the first half of the nineteenth century. Similarly linked to this system
were the professional cousinhoods of law and the army. The nineteenth-century
professions as a whole, especially those conferring a higher status, developed as
a kind of hyphen between land and industry, with a social ideal that hybridized a