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INTRODUCTION 55

bourgeois with a landed culture but which cannot be seen as ‘aristocratic’ in any
simple way. 51
Now, these assets did not stand over and against industrial capital except in
some popular adaptations (for example, Cobbett’s or Oastler’s radicalism) or
some literary formulations (Raymond Williams’s ‘culture and society’ tradition).
The former was a real component in popular resistance; the latter usually stopped
short at a ‘moral’ anti-capitalism or merely provided a gloss of romantic
rejection. Mostly the landed-conservative repertoire was pressed into the service
of capital as a whole. So it came about that the first working class whose
theories, forms of organization and strategies had, in any case, to be improvised
from the start, faced always a double armoury: the economic power of
manufacturer and farmer/landlord; the ideologies of deference and of self-help;
High Tory Anglicanism and militant Dissent or popular anti-Catholicism;
Chadwick’s and Peel’s newly professionalized police and gentry justice; popular
political economy and ‘moral and religious education’; utilitarian political
philosophy and an anti-democratic conservatism or Whiggery; bourgeois special
constabulary and an aristocratically led plebeian army.
This repertoire clearly had considerable stopping power. But, more important,
it could deflect. It deeply influenced the nature of English radicalism, making it
possible to construct the ‘camouflaged’ forms of politics on which Marx so often
commented. For while English ‘aristocracy’ persisted (and 1850 is much too
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soon for the point of fusion), it could continue to appear to dominate English
politics and to be the main butt of popular resentment. The division of large
landed capitals and (relatively) small industrial capitals was sufficiently real to
permit the construction of a whole national politics on this basis. So it was that
the commonest form of English radicalism was an anti-aristocratic populism,
not, or only imperfectly or temporarily, any kind of socialism. Apart from the
Chartist/Owenite interlude of 1838–45 and, perhaps, the late nineteenth-century
‘socialisms’, this was true from Tom Paine to the early Chamberlain and the late
Lloyd-George. The most powerful mystification of all was the mid nineteenth-
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century Liberal party. Offering, concretely, very little to working people, it
consisted of a leadership which was Whig, landowning and (if anyone was)
‘aristocratic’, plus the organizing, propagandizing power of Dissent and the big
bourgeoisie, plus a rank and file of shopkeepers and artisans, all held together by
an ideology that was basically anti-aristocratic. The counterpoint to this was a
populist, demagogic conservatism, ringing the changes on themes of Nation and
Empire and (perceptibly from the 1860s, markedly from the 1880s) attracting the
support of property of all kinds. 55
Exactly this political dialectic has been less marked since the decline of the
big landed capitalist or his transmutation into another kind of rentier. Yet
liberalism, in classic forms or in the mutant shapes of ‘social reform’, has been
astonishingly persistent and pervasive in English political life. It has, indeed,
formed that ‘absent centre’ for which Anderson searched, together, as Edward
Thompson stresses, with elements in English bourgeois religion. One can go