Stuart Hall the Tyranny of History - An Analysis of Britain's Decline

7/31/2019 Stuart Hall the Tyranny of History - An Analysis of Britain's Decline

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1 The Tyranny of History:An Analysis of Britains Decline

John A. Hall

Sources of Greatness

If we are to understand Britains fall from power, it is first necessary to

say something about the character of British pre-eminence. One of the

signal virtues of John Brewers The Sinews of War: War, Money and theEnglish State, 1688-1783 is to remind us that Britains rise to power

depended upon a militarism so pervasive and efficient that, during the long

eighteenth century, it was able to triumph over France, despite the latters

greater population and resources.1 Of course, the sinews of war are

provided by money, and Brewers fundamental contribution is in the fiscal

sociology of the British state. Britain extracted far more in taxes than did

France. This was especially evident during the Napoleonic Wars when the

incidence of taxation rose to 35 per cent of both commodity output and

per capita income, perhaps double the rate imposed in France.2

If there

were as many tax inspectors in Britain as in France, British taxes were

collected by a much smaller bureaucracy, without the exertions of internal

security forces. How was this possible? Did not the absolutism of theseventeenth-and eighteenth-century French state count for anything?

An essay by the distinguished historical sociologist Michael Mann in his

States, War and Capitalism helps us answer these questions.3

The

Autonomous Power of the State usefully distinguishes between the formal

despotic powers of the state and the ability to achieve its will, something

held to be dependent on the infrastructural capacity to actually penetrate

and organise social relations. We can add a gloss to this: a limitation on

the power of the state can enhance its actual strength, essentially because

increased legitimacy allows it to penetrate society more deeply. In fact,

this point is by no means new. Tocqueville was well aware that the British

state was made exceptionally powerful by its being forced, largely because

it possessed a navy rather than a standing army, to co-operate with its

aristocracy rather than to sideline it in a Versailles; differently put: the

British upper classes submitted to high taxation because they felt the state

to be their own.


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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline6High incidence of taxation also stands behind the financial revolution of

the late seventeenth century, that is, the founding of the Bank of Englandand the creation of an interest specialising in the trading of money. It was

this interrelated and mutually supportive institutional mix of finance and

militarism which made it possible for Britain to gain Frances colonial

territories in the course of the eighteenth century. It is true that the one

defeat suffered by Britain meant the loss of the American colonies. But

this was largely a blessing in disguise: it led to a successful assault on old

corruption that removed much of the patronage and venality encrusted in

the British state, thereby enabling it to survive the life-and-death struggle

with Napoleonic France. By 1815 British pre-eminence was established

and generally apparent.

A more complete appreciation of the nature of British power depends

upon understanding the changing nature of the British economy. TonyWrigleys important Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of

the Industrial Revolution in Englandserves us well in this respect.4 His

argument draws an analytic distinction between an advanced organic

economy and a mineral-based economy. Eighteenth-century Britain is the

outstanding example of the former: its economy was highly

commercialised, and its remarkable level of urbanisation rested upon the

extraordinary productivity of those who worked in agriculture. It is

important to note in passing that taxation was high in eighteenth-century

Britain, in part because it was easier to extract resources from a

commercial economy than from one based on peasant agricultural

production; differently put, if the organic nature of the British polity

ensured consent in tax gathering, the other factor of high tax incidence was

the existence of an already commercialised economy. Nonetheless,

economic advance was strictly limited, as contemporaries such as Adam

Smith insistently emphasised, by the fact that all energy sources had an

organic base, most notably fodder and timber. In contrast, the widespread

use of mineral energy allows for sustained growth; it forms the basis of a

genuine revolution in human affairs.

All this makes it absolutely clear that there is no automatic transition

between the establishment of capitalism and the first creation of an

industrial society. The presence of an organic state may well be necessary

for the first emergence of commercial society; thus Adam Smith may have

been right to speak of a necessary connection between liberty and

commerce, and Weber of England as the cradle of capitalism.5

But

capitalism represents no long-term change in human destinies unless it canbase itself on the use of minerals for energy. This point is illustrated most

effectively by the decline of the Dutch Republic. This decline of a society


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John A. Hall 7

which clearly provided a suitable shell for capitalism resulted from the

exhaustion of peat, the energy base upon which the Dutch miracle hadflourished - and not, as some of the more extravagant theorists of

hegemony would have it, from having taken the leading role for capitalist

society.6

In contrast, a sustained industrial revolution was possible in

Britain because of the presence of very extensive coal stocks.

The industrial revolution gave an enormous boost to Britains position

in the world. Most strikingly, that huge increase in collective power

enabled Britain to handle a national debt which had reached crippling

proportions by the end of the Napoleonic Wars; Gladstonian retrenchment

was made possible by sustained economic growth. Equally importantly,

the industrial revolution led to Britain taking on, so to speak, a certain

camouflage, losing its militarist/mercantilist trappings and adopting,

sometimes very na vely, the language of liberalism. British industry hadsuch a technological lead that it became very clearly in its interest to

accept, and very occasionally to actively press for, free trade. Nonetheless,

a general appreciation of the importance of the coming of industry should

not blind us to the fact that the British economy, even in the middle of its

nineteenth-century climacteric, remained solidly dominated by financial

rather than industrial interests. Britain never balanced its current account

by means of the export of manufactures alone; profits derived from the

myriad activities that took place within the boundaries of the City of

London - the foreign exchange and money markets, insurance, the

financing of trade, and foreign investment - were always crucial to British

prosperity.

Decline, Inevitable and Self-inflicted

The analytic category of decline is poorly understood and

conceptualised.7

The most important point to be made initially about it is

that much decline within capitalist society is normal. The centre of

capitalist society has never remained in the same place for long and this

fact, the result of comparative advantage and the advantages of

backwardness (that is, the ability to apply the most up-to-date equipment

and methods when development does take place), suggests that Britain was

bound to lose its dominant role. It is worth noting in this context that

Britains eighteenth-century capitalist lead was based on advantages

difficult to copy elsewhere, such as a marked awareness of Malthusianfactors, extreme individualism, an elaborate apprenticeship system, and a

basic welfare system.8

In contrast, Britains advantage as pioneer of


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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline8industrial capitalism was not sustained for long, as this mode of

production proved to be very easily imitable.The diffusion of techniques and practices throughout capitalist society

inevitably creates relative decline. This is no calamity: the growth path of

the most advanced state can remain strong and its economy healthy even

as its share of total world product diminishes. The British economy was, in

most respects, prospering in precisely this way before the First World

War.9

If Britain performed poorly in some new industries, it distinctly

dominated others - most notably, leisure, soap and biscuits; nor was

performance in innovation unalterably poor, as was most strikingly

demonstrated by the extremely successful creation of a chemical industry

during the First World War. Similarly, very careful analysis does not

indicate that the export of capital in this period was of such proportions as

to undermine British competitiveness, especially since recent scholarshipshows that far more of those exports than had been previously thought

were accounted for by direct, rather than portfolio, investment.

Furthermore, the British education system, despite blind spots, was more

responsive to the needs of a modern technological society than has hitherto

been realised; this has not been appreciated because various rigidities of

the German statist system, with which it is rather glibly compared, were

ignored and the extent of educational provision in Britain outside the state

sector was underestimated.

Despite all this, we need to conceptualise decline which is not inevitable,

relative and normal but rather unnecessary and self-inflicted. If Britain had

to fall, did it have to fall so very far? France and Germany were always

likely to gain after the Second World War since a proportionately larger

agricultural workforce together with less industrial concentration ensured

that they would have a higher growth path.10

But did they have to overtake

Britain quite so much? In order to try to answer this question we need to

consider, beyond the diffusion of practices within capitalism, some topics

in geopolitics and social organisation.

Decline can result from geopolitical exhaustion. This can be quite as

much a factor beyond national control as is the diffusion of practices

throughout capitalism: it can be natural rather than self-inflicted. This is

strikingly true of British history. Geopolitical exhaustion played a decisive

role in decline. Britain was faced in the modern world by Germany, a

geopolitical rival beyond appeasement. The waging of two world wars

resulted in the loss of external balances and inability in l945 to protect

itself against Americas almost brutal insistence on becoming the worldsleader.


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John A. Hall 9

Equally, however, geopolitical exhaustion can be, so to speak, self-

inflicted: over-extension can be so great as to undermine the economy.This diagnosis should not be applied lightly to the British case. Before

1914 the burden of defence on British taxpayers - measured as a

proportion of net national income - was smaller than it was on those of

France, Germany and Russia, and this despite the fact that British

expenditure had to provide protection for the empire as well!11

This

powerfully suggests that the Pax Britannica so dear to theorists of

hegemonic stability is a myth: Britain had an economic lead, but was never

in a position to impose its will on other powers within capitalism. The long

peace of the nineteenth century resulted from the ending of the struggles

between France and Britain and the successful maintenance of the balance

of power - and not from any hegemonic leadership supplied by Britain.

But these reservations should not obscure an imperial component inBritish decline. It is important to identify that component precisely. The

move from an empire of free trade to the formal acquisition of territories in

the late nineteenth century did come to affect the British economy, though

barely perceptibly before 1914. Thereafter, nationalist demands turned the

empire into a veritable millstone around the neck of Britains prosperity. In

the inter-war years it became costly, drained away talent and prevented the

metropolis from giving sufficient attention to the European theatre. And

that was not the end of its impact. It was a legacy of pre-eminence that

much of Britains decline occurred as the result of trading in easy imperial

markets - albeit this direction of trade became virtually an imperative in

l945 because of the need to repay sterling balances to the Commonwealth.

The effect of this pattern was exceptionally deleterious: Britain did not

fully participate in the more competitive, higher-technology markets of

Europe, and was thereby foredoomed to a lower growth rate than those of

the continental European states.12

But more striking than this is the self-inflicted damage caused by social

sclerosis. Mancur Olson has interestingly argued that states find it hard to

adapt continually because over time their societies come to control them;

differently put: nation states tend to institutionalise their moments of

success.13

It is this type of decline that, quite understandably, has been at

the centre of attention of modern British scholars. Let us then look at their

analyses of social stagnation, and of the inability of the British state to

reverse it.


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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline10Locating the Guilty Party

Michael Manns essay on The Decline of Great Britain is representative

of a striking view, widely shared by many British scholars, both in

identifying three culprits - the unions, the aristocratic embrace and the City

- and in considering the last to have been far more influential than the

others.14

But before we look at each in turn, something must be said about

the concept of responsibility. The most useful sense of this word is the

neutral one, that is, that which establishes which social force or group

caused stagnation or limited the capacity of the state to modernise at any

particular moment - to accept this meaning is, of course, to recognise that

excessive and self-inflicted decline is in a sense as normal as is relative

decline. But responsibility also implies that things might have been

different; it would be idle to deny that this usage of the word isoccasionally present in what follows.

The best way of approaching an assessment of the British working class

is by means of a recent finding of contemporary sociologists of the state,

namely, that working-class political consciousness results more from

political oppression than from the logic of the capitalist mode of

production per se.15

Thus the presence of citizenship rights for most adult

white males in the USA from the 1830s explains the absence of socialism

in the United States - which is not, of course, to deny that fierce fights took

place at the industrial level. In contrast, tsarist autocracy managed,

incredibly, to turn its workers into genuine revolutionaries - perhaps the

only occasion in history when this has been achieved. The British case

stands fairly close to that of the USA, insofar as the state was at most

times liberal. But it was not always, and citizenship rights had to be fought

for during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This fight

lent the British working class a sense of identity: conflict was not visceral

enough to create Marxist class consciousness, but a distinctive sense of

class identity and loyalty did emerge.16 The British working class became

an estate of the Realm, securely possessed of its own culture: it kept

pigeons, gambled, went to the pub and, to the despair of its leaders,

preferred football matches to political meetings. A single image can

cement the point. Where a Kautsky sat in cafs dreaming up theoretical

schemes of great complexity, Arthur Henderson, the organisational

dynamo of the early Labour Party, was otherwise engaged: he was an

expert player of lawn bowls, helped found Newcastle United Football

Club, and was a Methodist lay preacher.It is certainly true that by the late 1960s trade-union liberties had

become powerful enough to defeat various statist plans for modernisation.


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John A. Hall 11

Trade-union power played a very large role in destroying Wilsons 1966-

70 government as well as those of Heath and Callaghan. Further negativepoints need to be noted. We know from Edward Thompson that the

English working class was made prior to industrialisation; importantly, it

was thereafter in opposition to that new industrial world.17

This stands in

great contrast to, say, the Swedish working class whose birth in and of

industrialisation made it naturally concerned for the health of the new

economy. Another consequence of early institutionalisation is a myriad of

unions, often at war with each other in various boundary disputes; this,

too, has negatively affected economic life, making it especially hard to

establish secure corporatist arrangements.

Nonetheless, there are good reasons for scepticism towards the view

that British economic decline results from the militancy of the working

class. Firstly, a series of studies have suggested that low productivity ofBritish workers may have more to do with low investment than with

resistance to change. In particular, where levels of investment have

equalled those for European workers, productivity has been similar; at the

present time, Japanese companies apparently find British workers to be the

most productive within Europe.18

Secondly, and much more importantly,

the British working class has notalways opposed plans for modernisation.

What is notable about the union leadership of the first twenty or so years

after 1945 was the deference it showed to the political elite. Militancy

came in response to economic failure, which it then exacerbated; but it was

not the prime mover.

The second thesis about decline concerns the aristocratic embrace. It

has been most strikingly articulated by Martin Wiener in English Culture

and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit.19 Early Victorian Britain

benefited, in this view, from a puritanical, bourgeois and industrial culture

which was slowly swallowed up by the embrace of an aristocracy devoted

to finer things than mere production: the world of Isambard Brunel is held

to have fallen before that of William Morris and Laura Ashley. This thesis

was enthusiastically endorsed by leading Conservative politicians over the

last decade, not least by Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

This second thesis deserves to be handled with as much scepticism as

the last. It tends to be based on literary evidence showing scorn for the

crass materialism of industrial pursuits. But such literary and aesthetic

scorn was not confined to Great Britain - indeed it was something of a

European staple, as Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks so clearly

demonstrates. Equally importantly, W.D. Rubinstein has now providedsufficient information about British men of wealth to make it possible to

completely dispel the image of sons of businessmen retreating to the


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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline12countryside.

20Almost uniformly, industrial entrepreneurs have been far

less wealthy than those with landed wealth and those who work in the City.The decision to avoid British industry makes perfect sense in the most

economistic terms, once we realise that the real money has always been

found in the City. The theory of the aristocratic embrace, especially in this

form, is not much help in understanding British decline.

The final theory concerns the importance for British economic life of the

City of London. This theory received an early and brilliant formulation

from Susan Strange, and it has recently been usefully extended by

Geoffrey Ingham.21 The subtleties of the Strange/Ingham thesis of the

autonomous but convergent interests of the Holy Trinity of Bank of

England, City of London and Treasury cannot be fully captured in this

limited space, but three ways in which the power of finance has proved

deleterious to Britains industrial sector can be distinguished.The organisation of the City has been such, firstly, that British industry

has not benefited from intensive capital investment. An interesting example

of this can be seen in a company started in the Edwardian years by Fred

Hopper.22

This enterprise sucessfully expanded from bicycles to motor

bicycles and eventually to cycle cars, and it had a flourishing export

component. Nonetheless, its potential growth into car production was

stymied by such a lack of capital that the firm was eventually forced into

liquidation. It is crucial to remember that the City makes profits trading in

money and in shares - that is, its profits do not derive from involvement

with productive enterprise, as is famously the case in Germany and Japan.

At first glance, it might seem as if the Citys involvement with British

industry in the 1930s stands as an exception to this generalisation. This is

not so: the merger boom of the time made large profits for financiers, but it

was not accompanied by any fundamental restructuring or rationalisation

of industry.23

Secondly, the City has always insisted that a stable, high exchange rate

is necessary for its proper functioning. The classic instance of this is, of

course, the return to the Gold Standard in 1925. Probably more important

still were those stop-go policies of the post-war decades, when

government-led expansion would be followed by sharp retraction in order

to protect over-valued sterling. The effect of these policies was simple:

British goods were priced out of world markets - an experience that

became familiar to Americans when the dollar was especially strong in the

early Reagan years. This clearly represents self-inflicted rather than

merely unavoidable relative decline; for it was in the post-war decades thatBritains growth rate, by no means bad in comparison to its own history,

noticeably diverged from those of its European competitors.


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John A. Hall 13

Finally, the City has insisted quite as much upon the necessity of

freedom from regulation. This has meant that few attempts have beenmade at an industrial policy - certainly no long-term planning, even of an

indicative type, has really ever been properly tried in Britain. Laissez-faire

has ruled.

This radical re-interpretation of British history lies at the core of much

recent British scholarship. The historians Scott Newton and Dilwyn Porter

in Modernisation Frustrated: The Politics of Industrial Decline in

Great Britain since 1900 chronicle the many occasions on which

industrial initiatives were blocked by financial interests.24 But even more

impressive is sociologist Christel Lanes Management and Labour in

Europe: The Industrial Enterprise in Germany, Britain and France, a

detailed account of the micro workings of the contemporary British

economy.

25

The picture painted by Lane of the British economy is dire in the

extreme. In Germany, very high levels of training for workers, as well as

the integrated decision-making style, result from the fact that redundancies

are hard to effect, given laws requiring long warnings of closure and

generous compensation: skill and flexibility in the work-force derives from

a background consensus that all are members of a common enterprise. An

equivalent awareness that the granting of a measure of power to the social

partner may increase ones own strength, is not apparent in Britain: there

is no incentive to train a labour force which can be easily laid off and that

in turn encourages a management style based on direction rather than

consensus. All in all, the greatest failure of contemporary Britain seems to

be the inability to incorporate ordinary working people into any sort of

social consensus. Lanes portrait of the managerial cadre is quite as

depressing: compared with their German counterparts, British managers

are poorly trained, heavy-handed and still massively suffering from the

myriad of complexes induced by attendance at public schools.

Up to this point, it might seem as if Lanes analysis endorses the above

identification of the first two of the guilty parties, and that British banks

are right not to invest in British industry given the poor rates of return to

be expected. The burden of her analysis, however, is precisely that the

dominance of finance over industry accounts for the micro-behaviour

described. Where German banks long-term interest in market share

encourages the deepening of human capital at every level, the prevalence

of take-overs in Britain, with the consequent emphasis on the yearly

declaration of high dividends, makes it rational not to develop particularskills.


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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline14Two clarifications to this dominant interpretation of British decline can

make it still stronger. On the one hand, we have seen that the Britishworking class by the l960s had indeed become an obstacle to industrial

renewal, even though decline could not be laid at its door; similarly,

British management is, as argued, notoriously inefficient, although that is,

as noted, largely the result of the division within British capitalism. On the

other hand, concentration on the role of financial interests can imprint on

this theory an instrumentalist, even conspiratorial character. The small

numbers of people involved in the workings of the City, the Treasury and

the Bank of England, their interlinking and overlapping in their social

world, are of a nature to make a conspiracy theory, for once, extremely

plausible. Nonetheless, it is necessary to go beyond such instrumentalism.

The instincts of the British ruling elite were often vital of consequence,

that is, state actors autonomously acting on them sometimes determinedkey political outcomes. The famous bonfire of controls that brought the

wartime planned economy to an end in 1948 was lit by politicians;

similarly, Wilsons refusal to devalue sterling in l964 was very much due

to his own obsession with prestige.26

More recently, the autonomy of the

state elite was seen in the very public refusal of Margaret Thatcher to

accept the advice of Gordon Richardson when Governor of the Bank of

England. To generalise bluntly about the character of this elite: it was at

once obsessed with great-power status and utterly complacent - as is

apparent in Anthony Powells great novel seriesA Dance to the Music of

Time, a fictional sociology of the elite. Perhaps this should not be

surprising. Winning wars leads to satisfaction with ones basic

institutions, to the belief that things are basically on track - an attitude,

incidentally, which explains the predominance of history over social

science in British intellectual life.

The fact that the political elite was not under absolute constraint returns

us to the question of responsibility. It seems fair to consider that at some

point in the post-war period the British political elite was responsible in

the fullest sense - that is, that rather than being merely the key agent, it

was also morally culpable. There is a certain rationality in hankering after

great-power status; but to allow 50 per cent of government research and

development money to be spent on military affairs in the 1980s is

altogether different - sheer madness.27 Tout comprendre, in this matter,

should not be tout pardonner.

If the emphasis consistently placed here on elite behaviour is scarcely

novel, it is unusual in contemporary social science. Attention shouldtherefore be drawn to one rather uncommon presupposition used in this

interpretation. Most theorists of society suggest that socio-economic


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John A. Hall 15

change is somehow more structural, works at a deeper level than the set of

social and political institutions which are presumed to exist somehow onthe surface of things. This is wrong. The argument here has been that pre-

industrial legacies matter. If Freud has justly been criticised by feminists

for insisting that biology is destiny, insufficient attention in contemporary

social science is given to the far more meritorious view that history is

destiny. This is certainly true of the differential formation of national

working classes. But this insight applies much more generally to Britain,

whose key social institutions, as we have taken care to note, were formed

prior to industrialisation. More particularly, by 1715 Britain had

developed that expertise in military and financial matters which remains

very largely intact today. In a sense, industrial decline should scarcely

surprise us: Britain was always a commercial rather than an industrial

society.Recently Mancur Olson has applied his theory of sclerosis to British

society in an analysis that suggests that Britain may be about to recover

because the organised working class has been disciplined.28

I am generally

much more sceptical than this highly representative American voice, of the

weight of the British labour movement as a whole. But what is most

striking about Olsons analysis is that he fails to understand which social

institutions really command British society. Much more radical changes

would be needed to upset the British pattern as a whole.

Is Britain Back?

An objection might be raised against this whole interpretation of British

history. Has not everything now changed? Certainly Margaret Thatcher

has claimed and continues to claim that the revolution associated with her

name has reversed British decline; in this matter, despite all their other

differences, John Major echoes his former leader. Should we accept the

claim that Britain is back? Extreme suspicion should be shown to this

claim - which is not to say, as we shall see, that fundamental structural

change may not now affect Britain.

Thatcher was essentially a reactive rather than a creative politician, a

Churchill rather than a Lloyd George. She was a good hater. Formally,

monetarism, the central doctrine of the Thatcherite revolution, absolves the

working class from responsibility for key economic decisions; but that

theory is best seen as a cover behind which the British working class was

disciplined, that is, unemployment was deliberately used as a political

weapon. Hostility was also shown to the aristocratic embrace. Significant


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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline16changes have been made, and the newly-monied have done rather well. On

the other hand, however, the boldest plans for doctors and lawyers,designed to bring competitive pricing into the Health Service and to

destroy the restrictive practices that give British barristers their raison

dtre, have had to be substantially modified in the face of corporate

pressure. Putting aside these points, however, it must be recognised that

the Thatcher governments - entirely meritoriously - made it absolutely

clear that Britains success depends upon the extent to which it can survive

within the international market.

If these are significant achievements, they do not amount to renewal.

Consider first some facts. It is only a matter of months since much was

made of the improved growth rate of the British economy during the

1980s. It is, of course, true that a continuation of that rate would, albeit

only over a period of thirty years or so, restore Britain to the first tier ofEuropean economies. As it stands, however, the improvement amounted to

little. The economy suffered absolute decline between 1979 and 1984;

significantly behind this decline lay not just that fall in GDP derived from

manufactures which was common to other advanced industrial nations, but

an absolute shrinking of manufacturing capacity. Furthermore, the growth

rates of the 1980s appear much less impressive once it is realised that they

were calculated from the low base of 1981, that is, after the economy had

already shrunk. It is equally important to remember that the actual

productive power that the British economy had in 1979 was only regained

in l985. In any case, the British economy has, since, once again started to

look extremely fragile: growth has disappeared, placing Britain again at

the bottom of the European league. It is already becoming apparent that

the Thatcherite experiment depended on revenues from North Sea oil

which allowed welfare payments for unemployment - whose rise was the

real reason for the putative increase in worker productivity - as well as tax

cuts. As those revenues continue to decline, trouble looks increasingly

likely.

It is doubtful that any sort of Thatcherite programme could lead to

industrial renewal. The formula for success within capitalist society seems

to be that a national society needs to be organised by its state if it is to

swim in the wider sea of capitalist society. This statement should not be

misunderstood. No advocacy is here being made or implied for industrial

planning behind tariff walls. Whatever the needs of infant industries,

nationalisation and protection of basic industries tends to lead to

stagnation, and to noticeable distortions of the political process.29 Such apolicy is particularly undesirable in Britain, given the lack of industrial

training of the Civil Service - a factor which the British Left has singularly


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John A. Hall 17

failed to address. Nor is any particular advocacy for incomes policies or

indeed for corporatism intended. The shrinking of the manual workingclass in all late-industrial economies means that the need to incorporate

and control trade unions is much diminished: much more can now be left

to the workings of the market. Nonetheless, successful economies are those

where states make their citizens, mostly through high standards of

education, capable of responding flexibly to international economic

change.30

In contrast, the mere disciplining of British workers, the return

to a nineteenth-century situation, is not likely to produce human material

able to work with the high technology of the late-industrial age. Successful

national economies within capitalist societies are backed by states which

organise, even when they do not plan: they stand far removed from the

Thatcherite insistence that the state wither away.

The political troubles of the British economy have often been enshrinedin the following paradigm. One of the two major parties is interested in

profit, but from commerce rather than from industry; the other major party

is concerned with industry, but it hardly understands the need for profits

entailed in capitalism. Despite much sound and fury, little has changed:

currently there is no programme likely to regenerate Britain, and the most

logical prognostication remains that of continued decline.

Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the pattern of British politics is

perhaps now more fluid than it has been for 250 years. Increased economic

integration with Europe from 1992 may well, given both Britains lack of

preparation and the character of European Community institutions,

severely hurt the British economy initially. But deeper involvement with

Europe may have more serious consequences for key British institutions. It

is unlikely that the European Community will want to so order its economy

as to allow the constant threat of take-overs to disrupt its characteristic

pattern of industrial life: most European states look set to continue their

privileging of industry as against finance. The traditional British

preference for an unrestricted equity market is likely to be severely

curtailed by its European partners. All in all, the British system of

institutions may be disrupted far more fundamentally by Europe than it

was by Margaret Thatcher.


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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline18

Notes

1 New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989.

2 Brewer makes this point at p. 89. He is drawing here on two important

recent studies: Michel Morineau, Les budgets dEtat et gestion des finances

royales en France au dix-huitime sicle, Revue Historique 536, Number 2,

1980, pp. 289-336 and Peter Mathias and Patrick OBrien, Taxation in

England and France, 1715-1870. A Comparison of the Social and Economic

Incidence of Taxes Collected for the Central Governments, Journal of

European Economic History 5, Number 3, 1976, pp. 601-50.3 Michael Mann, The Autonomous Power of the State, in States, War and

Capitalism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 1-32.

4 New York and Cambridge, England, 1988. This book can usefully be readtogether with a recent collection of Wrigleys essays, People, Cities and

Wealth: The Transformation of Traditional Society, Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1987.5 Alan MacFarlane, The Cradle of Capitalism - The Case of England, in

Jean Baechler, John A. Hall and Michael Mann, eds., Europe and the Rise

of Capitalism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 185-203.6 Joshua Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age,

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; George Modelski, The Long

Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation State, Comparative Studies in

Society and History 20, Number 2, 1978, pp. 214-38.7 Interesting comments made by Mann in The Decline of Great Britain,

States, War and Capitalism, pp. 210-37, lie at the back of the (amended)

distinctions drawn here.

8 E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change, Chapter Four, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1988.

9 This paragraph draws heavily on Sidney Pollards Britains Prime and

Britains Decline: The British Economy 1870-1914, London: Edward

Arnold, 1989.10 Peter Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in

Britain and France, New York: Oxford University Press, l986, p. 27.11 John A. Hall, The Weary Titan? Arms and Empire, 1870-1913, in

Coercion and Consent, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.12 Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-51, London:

Methuen, l984.13 Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations, New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1982.14 Michael Mann, The Decline of Great Britain; Perry Anderson, The

Figures of Descent,New Left Review, Number 161, January-February 1987,


15/16


16/16

The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline20

Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty, Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1978, pp. 89-138.

27 Sir John Kingman, Science and the Public Purse, Government and

Opposition 21, Number l, 1986 pp. 3-16.28 Mancur Olson, Is Britain the Wave of the Future? How Ideas Affect

Societies, in Mann, The Rise and Decline of the Nation State, Yale

University Press, 1982, pp. 91-113.29 See, for example, the superb analysis in Carlos Waisman, Reversal of

Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Politics and

Their Structural Consequences, Princeton: Princeton University Press,

l987.30 This view underlies Lane,Management and Labour. Cf. Peter Katzenstein,

Small States in World Markets, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, l985;

Linda Weiss, Creating Capitalism: Small Business and the State since

l945, New York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, l988; Ron Dore, StructuralRigidities: Industrial Policy and Structural Adjustment in the Japanese

Economy, 1970-80, London: Athlone Press, l986.

Stuart Hall the Tyranny of History - An Analysis of Britain's Decline

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