R.F. Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society is a hallmark of thinking about the moral economy, and this is not the first time that I have expressed any measure of sympathy and agreement for the criticism he makes of the present system, without necessarily approving of its consequential form of organisation.[1] In my last post, I covered some of the key aspects of Tawney’s thought; this post is dedicated to his definition of hierarchy’s role in property. At the outset, it must be noted that Tawney’s aristocratic politics have a remarkable salience with Alexis de Tocqueville’s, but there is a marked difference insofar as while both recognise the aristocracy to be functional, to be with an end, a purpose, Tocqueville is far more enraptured by it while Tawney’s praise is strongly qualified and is present as a conditional preference, not as a good in itself. I will first examine Tawney’s thoughts on aristocratic governance before comparing them with Tocqueville’s in The Ancien Régime.[2]
For Tawney, property is inextricably tied up with function: it is a bundle of rights and obligations, which are the parts that comprise the whole, and since the whole is by necessity prior to the parts, property can exist without those rights and obligations it entails, but without the parts the whole seems to be wholly illegitimate. Tawney uses the analogy of a Gothic cathedral: “The parts derive their quality from their place in the system, and are so permeated by the unity which they express that they themselves are glad to be forgotten, as the ribs of an arch carry the eye from the floor from which they spring to the vault in which they meet and interlace.”[3] The individual parts, important as they are, are rather irrelevant without the whole; the whole is incomplete and unwanted without the parts. An empty tympanum, a classical arch instead of a rib-eyed vault, statues without gothic slender and grace are all out of place: they are, dare I say, as important to the function of the cathedral as the sacristy and altarpiece. Thus, Tawney posits that “property is moral and healthy only when it … involves the discharge of definite personal obligations.”[4] Property is without justification if it does not involve some degree of obligation that arises from it: it is a means, never an end in itself, and thus the acquisitive society is a perversion of the functional understanding of property — it makes property the end, not the means, and thus it is aimed at the propagation of a fundamentally immoral mode of thought and praxis.
This is the basis upon which Tawney examines the role of the aristocracy: it is a functional hierarchy, one that must be abolished. He writes:
“The hold which a class has upon the future depends on the function which if performs. What nature demands is work: few working aristocracies, however tyrannical, have fallen; few functionless aristocracies have survived. In society, as in the world of economic life, atrophy is but one stage removed from death.”[5]
It is thus that Tawney ventures into the realm of the French aristocracy and the Ancien Regime:
“Long after political changes had made direct interference impracticable, even the higher ranks of English landowners continued to discharge, however capriciously and tyrannically, duties which were vaguely felt to be the contribution which they made to the public service in virtue of their estates. When, as in France, the obligations of ownership were repudiated almost as completely as they have been by the owner of to-day, nemesis came in an onslaught upon the position of a noblesse which had retained its rights and abdicated its functions.”[6]
Tawney recognises that the feudal system of land ownership was not the most humane form of existence, but whatever its faults, it recognised that property was not an inalienable right but contingent upon the performance of certain duties, that social and economic hierarchy served an important end that ought to have been reinforced as the times went by but was instead eroded by the rise of self-interest as an acceptable justification for relentless acquisitiveness. The existence of a nobility is ransomed by the spirit that they embody, namely, that those less fortunate than them must be protected by those more fortunate: it is the expression of a fundamental duty without which society cannot function. Social organisation, then, is merely instrumental for Tawney, but bereft of Tocqueville’s sentimentality for the aristocracy.[7] The duty of the landed is always to those without it; the duty of those with means is always toward those without it. The moral obligations — of virtue, of charity — that are presupposed in those dispensed toward leisure are inalienable from the exercise of property as an institution. One cannot expect privileges and rights that go beyond what the common man ought to receive under the law if one is unable to find some level of functional justification, a net benefit if we are to use the language of cost-benefit analysis, to the existence of any norm except that which holds man to be fundamentally identical and equal to his peers. Tawney’s support for the medieval ages, as has been noted before, is support insofar as it advocates for guild socialism, for the professionalisation and nationalisation of much economic activity, but even the other corollary to the medieval ages outside of the municipalities and other urban hotspots, the feudal aristocracy, finds its relevance in the development of the subsistence guarantee, of assistance duly rendered when required to one’s tenants, and not the acquisitive nature of serfdom which invariably proved to be an essential duty elsewhere: a truly global phenomena, one might argue.[8] The functional nature of the feudal, landed class has no place in the acquisitive society, and thus distinctions of rank based upon the corresponding duty of noblesse oblige are more suspect to revolutionary fervour. As long as the aristocracy understood their minimally redistributive role, they were a good: at any rate, this is Tawney’s argument.
* *
But what does this have to do with Tocqueville? Tawney only mentions the aristocracy en passant in his Acquisitive Society,[9] but Tocqueville is far more concerned with the revolutionary world he lives in and argues along similar basis. But Tocqueville’s sentimental attachment to the aristocratic disposition — a disposition that seems to be the pinnacle of excellence that democratic politics seems to infuriate — is more measured, and his substantive remarks made about the institution are concentrated in the Ancien Regime. Thus, the question of comparison is on two fronts, but only one ought to be of interest here: that of the aristocracy as a functional instrument with a substantial role to play in regular governance and in the health of the polis, not of the aristocratic disposition that seeks to exalt excellence and fosters an essential sense of noblesse oblige in those well endowed with it. Sometimes, the two paths converge, but it is evident that Tawney does not see the existence of a leisured class as inherently good,[10] and thus the projection of Tocqueville’s aristocratic disposition onto Tawney’s work is anachronistic and we ought not to seek one in the other.
Tocqueville’s contention is that by the time of the French Revolution, “the lord was, in real terms, merely an inhabitant separated and isolated from everyone else by immunities and privileges. His social position, not his power, was different.”[11] He had been replaced by a tide of centralisation and the system of tailles, which all but guaranteed that he would have nothing to do with administration or providing for the nation, but everything in terms of exemption from onerous taxes and the like. By the time of the French Revolution, the countryside was ruled by “state officials who were no longer agents of the manor and no longer chosen by the lord.”[12] The question thus posed was a functional one: could an aristocracy survive when, well, it did nothing? The French aristocracy was a class of rentiers who extracted much from the economy — land rents, tithes, taille, the lods et ventes, the ancien regime’s equivalent of stamp duty payable to the local lord — and without purpose, benefit, or function.[13] Tocqueville places the blame squarely at the hands of the aristocrats, for “if the French peasant had still been governed by his lord, the feudal rights would have seemed to him much less intolerable because he would have seen them only as a natural consequence of the constitution of the country.”[14]
The function of the aristocracy extended far beyond the simplistic notion that it was merely the hand of the state which transacted business in its name and governed those under it. Tocqueville notes that “in the old feudal society, if the lord enjoyed powerful rights, he also had heavy responsibilities. He had to help the needy within his domains.”[15] The aristocracy was the social welfare system: it cared for those under its watch, it gave back consistently even when there was not much to go around, and provided a highly personalised system where the individual, even as serf, still retained a semblance of dignity in knowing that his lord would protect his subsistence without necessarily subjecting him to the market. [The job of protecting his soul fell to the Church]. But this definitive set of obligations — the obligation to provide, for instance — was removed from the law books, partly out of greed for financial gain by the aristocrats, and partly because of the tendency toward centralisation that animated the relationship between the capital and the periphery. Thus, Tocqueville remarks, “no such law had existed in France for a long time.”[16] But Tocqueville here seems to be insistent that it was precisely because “the lord had had been relieved of his former powers, he had withdrawn from his former obligations.”[17] Here, it is seen that the aristocracy lost the sense of obligation they had to the land because of the lust for power that fostered centralisation in both administration and economic life, although Tocqueville’s commentary on the impact of the market on the aristocratic disposition and the aristocracy as an institution is rather curiously missing. What is clear is that the aristocracy, localised as it was, permeated the lives of the common peoples, and thus were able to adapt the form of subsistence relief and welfare that they provided to pressing local conditions and needs; on the other hand, when the central government took up the role of providing for the poor, “charity exercised at such a distance was often blind or whimsical and always far from being sufficient.”[18] In short, there could not be a sliver of assistance from the central government that did not suffer from the law of unintended consequences: while it was intended to assist those in need, top-down bureaucratic centralisation was an unmitigated disaster that pushed the ancien regime closer to the bring of rebellion. The peasants could feel no sense of fealty and loyalty to their lord, and would not dare support someone they saw as a mere extractor, not as the sum total of leadership, provision, safety, and justice for time immemorial.
How, then, can the survival and propagation of the English aristocracy be accounted for? If the French aristocracy was an institution that resembled the fossilised remains of dinosaurs, the English aristocracy was the contemporary chicken: it was ubiquitous and flexible, and adapted to the new situation it found itself in before being subject to existential danger, not after it. Tocqueville comments on his brethren across the channel:
“It is strange to observe how the English nobility, prompted by its own ambition, was able, when they thought it necessary, to mingle on familiar terms with its inferiors and to present to regard them as equals. … Certainly English aristocrats were, by nature, haughtiest than their counterparts in France and less inclined to fraternise with their inferiors; but the necessities of their social condition forced them into doing so. They were prepared to do everything in order to govern. Over the ensuing centuries the only inequalities of taxation among the English were those successively introduced in favour of the poorer classes. Just look, I beg you, where the different political principles can lead nations so geographically close to one another. In the eighteenth century in England the poor enjoyed tax privileges; in France, it was the rich. In the former, the aristocracy shouldered the heaviest public burdens in order to be allowed to govern; in France it preserved, to the last, the immunity from tax as a consolation for its loss of power.”[19]
The English aristocracy was able to adapt, accept newcomers in its ranks, and pass snide comments away from earshot. It was a peculiar institution that governed — until Tony Blair bludgeoned it to death, that is — and resembled the rising prosperity of the common man. It conferred as fairly as possible ranks of distinctions to newcomers, ruled, died valiantly on the battlefield when it was asked of them, and led from the front, by example. The Great War was the gentleman’s war. The English aristocracy continued to pay for relief, both directly through charity and indirectly through the higher tax burdens they were subject to. But they were far more willing to sacrifice material gains for nonmaterial goods: power, for once. It is for a similar reason that the English still enjoy an established state religion today, whilst France is militantly secular. The commercialisation of the British Isles changed the relationship between the aristocracy and the commoners, but it did not evolve into an institution that would be wholly unrecognisable to their feudal ancestors.
Only then can it be noted that aristocratic politics, at least the way that Tocqueville conceives of it, is far more complex and intricate than mere property relations: that although Tocqueville’s analysis of the aristocracy has some similarity with Tawney’s, the latter only thinks of it in minimalistic, functional terms, while the former projects onto it a much more significant task than the mere stewardship of those subject to it. It is the wide-ranging aristocratic function that renders it possible for the English aristocracy to thrive, even today, that enables distinctions of rank, privilege, and honour to have some value in the social, political, and economic realm. Tawney is not enthralled by the feudal aristocracy, but Tocqueville’s idealised form includes a significant mention of it.
[1] R.H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1920).
[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Gerald E. Bevan, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2008).
[3] Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 183.
[4] Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 83.
[5] Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 67.
[6] Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 60.
[7] Alan Kahan writes: “Tocqueville summed up the ideas of the stage of equality as contempt for the past, love of uniformity (both nationally and internationally), the exaltation of human reason over past history …”. His Democracy in America is a long paean to the aristocratic sensibility that has been laid bare by the encroachment of democratic politics; he is not the only one. Alan S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis De Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 33. The entire book is commendable, though it fails to make clear the differences between Mill, Burckhardt, and Tocqueville when they are quoted in passing without reference to the endnotes, a result of poor book design more than authorial intent in any case.
[8] As James C. Scott did. He argues that “at the core of popular protest movements of urban and rural poor in 18th and 19th century Europe was not so much a radical belief in the equality of wealth and landholding but the more modest claim of a ‘right to subsistence’ — a claim that became increasingly self-conscious as it was increasingly threatened.” James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 33.
[9] As I write this, I wish that I had read more of Tawney’s work, especially Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, which deals with the historical period we are concerned with in our examination of the modern world.
[10] Tawney argues that “those to whom a leisure class is part of an immutable order without which civilisation is inconceivable, dare not admit, even to themselves, that the world is poorer, not richer, because of its existence.” The Acquisitive Society, 136.
[11] Tocqueville, Ancien Regime, 40.
[12] Ibid.
[13] The lods et ventes “was a tax paid to the lord whenever land was bought or sold within the boundaries of the manor.” The taille was a tax payable to the central government: “Their [the nobility] obgliation to provide free military service cleared them from the tax,” but as time went on, “all new taxes became tailles,” and the burden of taxation disproportionately fell upon commoners, whose increased economic affluence turned into bitter resentment against the hierarchy of the old. Ibid, 42, 105–06.
[14] Tocqueville, Ancien Regime, 43.
[15] Ibid, 52.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid, 103–104.