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27 Cards in this Set
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What is Steven Wallech's thesis? |
The use of "class" in nineteenth-century Great Britain depended on changes in the perception of social division that occurred in the eighteenth century. Concepts of status in the eighteenth century associated specific occupations and types of property with particular "ranks," "social char- acter," and "distinction." The relationship between words like "rank," "station," and "order" and the social identity they defined depended on a sense of stability found in the organization of eighteenth-century British society. New ideas explaining the nature of the social structure undermined this stability and placed too much conceptual strain on the language. These conventional words, which functioned inter- changeably, gave way to the term "class." The area where this conceptual strain occurred with the greatest regularity was in the new discipline called political economy. |
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What is the Whig interpretation of class in the 18th century. Who are its representatives? |
Thomas Babington Macaulay and W. H. Lecky The two greatest moments in English/British history are the Glorious Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832. The growth of the middle class should have happened here. But because it didn't, the 18th century is presented as corrupt or?? |
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What is the Marxist interpretation of class in the 18th century? Who are its representatives? |
Macpherson and Hill For the Marxist, as for the Whig, bourgeois England should have appeared by the end of the seventeenth century. This eighteenth-century interlude is more uncomfortable for the Marxist than for the Whig, and hence there has been even less Marxist history of the eigh- teenth century than Whig. Since the Whig interpretation presents 1832 as the major victory for the middle class, the Whig story can accommodate a depic- tion of eighteenth-century society as not entirely bourgeois. For the Whigs, the delayed appearance of a middle-class society is a failure of morality or of will, but not of narrative. But for the Marxist, it is crucial that bourgeois society appear before the nineteenth century: who but the bourgeoisie would lead a capitalist society, make an industrial revolution, and transmogrify the peasantry into the proletariat? The most straightforward Marxist response is to declare that the social structure is other than it appears, that the dominant order in the eighteenth century- the landed elite- is actually the bour- geoisie in fancy dress! |
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How did Lewis Namier view 18th century social structures? |
Attacked both the Whig interpretation. Namier therefore delineated a society neither feudal nor bourgeois, a society structured neither by the armed might with which the noble terrified the serf, nor by the individual's confrontation with the market, but instead a society structured by the bond between patron and client. Because the client was free in theory, because patrons did in fact vie to influence voters and so encouraged clients to transfer their allegiance from one patron to another, Namier's model of eighteenth-century social structure can accommodate lower orders who occasionally reject a superior's guidance.'3 |
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What is J.G.A. Pocock's theory? |
Attacked both the Whig and Marxist interpretation. Based his interpretation in the freedom on the landed classes. Refuted the idea that political thought was based in Locke (which was a main thing for both the Whigs and the Marxists). Much of eighteenth-century political thought is a development of that Renaissance political ideology whose main concern was the preservation of a free republic against the vicissitudes of fortune. When in the mid-seventeenth century, Har- rington imported civic humanism into England, he determined that the posses- sion of landed property guaranteed independence. And so eighteenth-century England possessed an ideology which simultaneously repudiated feudalism and recognized hierarchy. |
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Describe Pockock's work on manners? |
Pocock is now in the midst of an attempt to show that the emphasis given to the concept of "manners" meant that, by the late eighteenth century, civic humanism could be ambiguous as well as ambivalent. For in Pocock's formula- tion, "manners" was the concept which enabled the civic humanist paradigm to effect ajuncture with another, distinct paradigm for thought-the jurispruden- tial paradigm. The civic humanist paradigm focused on government and per- sonal development; the jurisprudential paradigm on things and rights to things. In manners, the discourse associated with Harrington met the discourse in w Locke participated.22 And, for all these groups, manners both camouflaged and emphasized the am- biguities of their status. |
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What does Norma Landau conclude? |
In replacing the Whig and Marxist stories with new structures, historians have been attempting to delineate eighteenth-century society in terms which capture its seeming paradoxes: a society which is capitalist yet doubts the benefits of the capital market; agrarian, yet led by an elite at home in Westminister; increasingly urban, yet boasting a social life dominated by the small town; a society structured by patronage, but where the rights of the individual are guar- anteed by its legal system; a society cognizant of the virtue of crude simplicity and yet proud of its sophistication, its manners. It is the ambivalences central to this society which inform Austen's irony. And it has been the historian's task to demonstrate why these ambivalences denote not simply, or even primarily, the course of this society's change, but instead explain the stability of its struc |
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What did W. D. Rubinstein suggest in relation to 18th century elites? |
The new rich of the nineteenth century broke with the pattern of centuries and refrained from large-scale land purchases, in part because the es- tablished aristocracy had assumed a more "caste-like" mentality that held out- siders at bay. |
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How did John Cannon extend Rubinstein's theory? |
Demonstrated that throughout the eighteenth century recruits to the peerage were chosen from among the upper reaches of the landed aristocracy, a fact that suggested to him that the British nobility was a closed group, more closed than its continental counterparts |
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What did Lawrence and Jeanne Stone's study show? |
An immense study of the elite of three counties over a 340-year period; they concluded that the proportion of new- comers was small and that new recruits were drawn mainly from groups already affiliated with the aristocracy. It was not businessmen but small gentry, office holders, and members of the professions who dominated the ranks of newcomers to their county elites. |
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How did Habakkuk argue with the Stones'? |
John Habakkuk concluded in his Ford Lectures that "there was no weakening among new men in the eighteenth century of the desire to acquire landed estates. Almost all the wealthiest (or their descendants in the next generation) joined the landed elite...." |
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How did F. M. L. Thompson question Stone, Rubinstein and co.? |
Called into question Rubinstein's findings by challenging the usefulness of his probate data and by showing that millionaire Victorian businessmen or their direct heirs made sub- stantial land purchases. |
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What is Michael W. McCahill's study concerned with? What are its findings. |
Compares the English nobility to the French. The French admitted more people - Voltaire, for instance, being one of them. Even as the aristocracy adapted itself to standards whose origins lay in the middle class, the group retained its social and political coherence. The pre-requisite was a large estate. If some people buy small villas, they are at best 'pseudo-gentry.' Over the course of the century, the British elites were able to withstand bourgeois invasion, unlike the French. |
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How does David Spring challenge the Stones'? |
David Spring first raised questions about the appropriateness of including Northumberland as an example of an industrial county, a criticism with which Lawrence Stone agreed. More seriously, Spring later noted that in 1879 the Stones included only sixty- four Northumberland houses in their sample, whereas Bateman, basing his count on material from the New Domesday book, identified 146 estates in that county of more than 1,000 acres. An expansion of the Northumberland study group to include smaller estates, Spring argued, would have enlarged the proportion of recruits, especially business recruits to that county's aristocracy. In spite of this deficiency in the construction of one county's elite, Spring asserts that the Stones' own figures demonstrate that at any point twenty percent of the Stones' aristocracy were newcomers and that closer to a third were newcomers or their heirs, a substantial rate of turnover by any standard. |
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What does Harold Perkin point out? |
According to Harold Per- kin the proportion may have been even higher. He calls attention to the Stones' Table 8.1, which shows that between 1619 and 1879 the average number of owners was 180 and the maximum number was 220 in 1859. Over 340 years a group that initially included forty families and never exceeded 220 admitted 480 new purchasers.62 As Spring and Perkin both imply, a comparison of data in Tables 6.2 and 8.1 raises questions about the accuracy of figures relating to the proportion of new- comers in the former tab |
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What other studies confirm the open-ness of the elite? Who are they by? |
Jenkins and Perkins. Studies outside London's orbit. |
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Which historians point to the elites as the reason for the transformation of government in the late 18th century? |
Jupp, Harling, Mandler. |
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What new framework did J. H. Hexter introduce for the study of the middle class? What were his conclusions? |
The idea of 'how did the aristocracy do it?' Writes 'The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England.' On the one hand, he speculated that many successful Londoners in Tudor and early Stuart times sprang from the countryside, often from gentle stock. On the other, he maintained that the prime social aim of successful men of business was to establish themselves or their children in landed society. The upshot was a continuing 'flight of merchants to the land' which 'adversely affected the middle class' by depleting it of talent, capital and psychic backbone.3 |
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What did Nicholas Rogers' study show? |
Studied the origins and aspirations of the aldermen of London. Rogers' aldermen, by comparison to their Restoration counterparts, were (1) much more often London-born; (2) much more often wed to daughters of landed men; and (3) somewhat more likely to marry their daughters to landed men. In addition, an 'important number' of the eldest sons of the later group of aldermen remained active in the London business world, with bankers' sons particularly prone to follow in their fathers' footsteps. Rogers, then, describes a two-fold shift in relations between the London business elite and landed society - a tightening of links by way of marriage and a loosening of more traditional links as the proportion of London-born aldermen rose and as ' the quest for landed status' by them and their sons became 'less compulsive' so that by 1750 'the age of permanent City dynasties was beginning. |
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What are the conclusions of Henry Horowitz's study? |
But what we would emphasize is the still largely traditional character of social interchange between the London business world and landed society in Augustan England. For our subjects and their offspring, neither Rogers' picture of an increasingly hybrid plutocratic society nor the Stones' description of a process of'psychological cooption' seems to fit very well. Granted, there had been important economic changes since 1640, but it is our view that these tended to counterbalance one another in social terms. While the proportion of businessmen and their eldest sons purchasing landed estates appears to have declined (and that of the aldermen certainly did), it is likely that the absolute number of business purchasers did not fall sharply since the London business community as a whole underwent a considerable expansion. Again, while those who did buy estates after the Civil War may, because of the growing availability of alternative forms of secure investment, have committed a smaller share of their total assets to such acquisitions, their motives for such purchases stand out all the more clearly as dynastic and social.79 To perpetuate one's family name and to achieve social recognition, it was not enough to live in the expanding West End or to mingle with the 'quality' during the months of the London season. For those successful businessmen who aimed to put their families upon the map, it was the routes followed by their predecessors - marriage to landed men for their daughters, establishment on the land for theirsons - that remained the most travelled ones in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. |
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What did Perkin argue with regards to the lower orders? What are the problems with it? |
Perkin saw eighteenth-century society primarily as a finely graded hierarchy based on property and patronage in which the lives of the poor were controlled by a paternalistic landed elite. In his model 'Power always came back to the social control of the ordinary squire over his tenants and villagers', and the poor had precious little means of counterbalancing that power. 'In a world of personal dependency any breach of the great law of subordination . . . was', he wrote, 'ruthlessly suppressed. Resentment had therefore to be swallowed, or sublimated into religious dissent, or when pressed beyond endurance, it exploded in outbursts of desperate violence. Echoes the view of the elite themselves. |
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How did Thompson challange Perkins? |
By stressing the discipline of the crowd, and the widely accepted legitimizing notions - the moral economy - that lay behind such crowd activities as price-setting, Thompson's famous I97I article ensured that bread riots would never again be seen as 'outbursts of desperate violence'. By challenging the uncritical use of the term paternalism and the close personal control of the poor it implied, his I970S articles offered a very different picture of the 'social control' exercised by the gentry. ' 1 Pinpointing several changes including the decline of unfree labour, the growth of employment opportunities outside gentry control, the declining psychological impact of the church, the gentry's retreat from face to face contact with the poor, and the parasitic nature of the 'patrician banditti', Thompson argued that the eighteenth century witnessed both 'a crisis of paternalism' and the emergence of a particularly vibrant plebeian culture. Drawing together threads from his own and others' work on riot, on custom as a field of contest, and on popular recreations, rituals and mentalities, Thompson drew a new and complex picture of eighteenth-century plebeian culture. In his portrayal this was a vigorous, vibrant, non-Christian culture based on inherited customary expectations, reproduced by example, nurtured by experience, expressed by symbolism and ritual - a rebellious yet traditional culture which was the people's very own. In the eighteenth century, Thompson argued, a profound distance opened up between the cultures of the patricians and the plebs. However, since the authorities often felt it necessary to handle the poor's demands with delicacy and accommodation, a certain reciprocity also developed between rich and poor. |
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What problems does Peter King identify with Thompson's model? |
The debate on the 'moral economy.' The idea that the church didn't have a lot of clout. Thompson's later work raises the idea that this was perhaps more true to tradesmen and artisans. His reliance on the law as an instrument of hegemony overstates the power of the state. Crowds could influence and subvert the legal process eg. Tyburn or the Assizes. Has been criticised for giving too little power to the state. But later incorporates this - reconclining Brewer's powerful state as the state from without, whilst his own is the state from within. Linda Colley's work on support for the nation state. Rogers and the idea that smaller towns support Thompson's thesis. Approaches the history as a history of conflict between class rather than relationships within class. |
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How does Linda Colley argue with Thompson? |
Does Thompson give sufficient weight to those elements of plebeian culture and collective behaviour that do not fit into a patrician/plebeian polarity? Was he 'too ready to see opposition and rebellion in popular traditions and customs'? Did he leave too little room for the regressive impulses in popular consciousness or for its frequent penetration by ruling class ideas? Colley, in stressing the growing tendency of many working people to be involved more in expressing their support for the nation state than in opposing the men who governed it, certainly suggests as much. |
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How does Rogers criticise Thompson? |
Moreover, his tendency to focus in his eighteenth-century work on rural and small town England may have reinforced an implicit bias towards the study of crowds acting on their own behalf in defence of custom, food supplies or communal norms. In the larger towns and cities, as Rogers has pointed out, crowd behaviour, organization and mobilization in local political conflict was so complex that it does not fall easily into the patrician/plebeian model.3 |
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How does Wahrman's work challenge Thompson's conclusions? |
More problematic, however, than Thompson's use of these terms was his assumption that the gentry elite, and the propertied middling sort he broadly assumed to be their dependents, were relatively culturally homogeneous. This has recently been challenged by Wahrman's work on the divisions within the propertied, and particularly within the urban middling sort, between those who were nationally orientated and London-centred, and those who identified with a local/provincial communal culture.38 This work in turn feeds off, and contributes to, the most widespread set of critiques of Thompson's bipolar model, i.e. those which focus on its marginalization of the middling sort. |
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How did Thompson argue against Borsay, Langford et al.? |
Argued that they had charted the growth of the middle classes, but this wasn't really important until the end of the century. |
