In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at the
background against which the Oxford Movement took place, viz., the culture of elitism that found expression in English type
liberalism. This led naturally to an
overemphasis on capitalism to counter socialism. Since both capitalism and socialism are in
many respects fundamentally the same in theory as well as in practice,
socialism was as ineffective in overcoming capitalism as capitalism was in
countering socialism.
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| Walter Bagehot, the socialist capitalist |
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the theories of
Walter Bagehot a generation after the Oxford Movement. To summarize, Bagehot published his theories
in The English Constitution (1867)
and applied them in Lombard Street
(1873). They represent the logical
development of English type liberalism and the path it necessarily takes as
capital ownership becomes increasingly concentrated, and just prior to the
intrusion of socialism and their merging into the Servile State.
According to Bagehot, a relatively small economic élite (not to be confused with the “Upper
Ten Thousand” that ruled “society”) were the real power in the country. They had gradually usurped political power
since the days of the Tudors, and (according to Bagehot) properly so.
Bagehot carefully distinguished leadership in “society”
(meaning parties, balls, race meets, and so on) from leadership in government
and the economy. The Queen (a “retired
widow”) and the Prince of Wales (“an unemployed youth”) were the leaders of “society.”
They played an important role in
providing the lower classes with the easily understood fallacy that the monarch
ruled the country. Bagehot called this
the “dignified” aspect of the English Constitution. It was a social convention to pacify the unintelligent
masses.
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| House of Lords: dignified, not efficient |
The real power, according to Bagehot, resided in the House
of Commons, the House of Lords being another “dignified” aspect of the
Constitution of the country. The House
of Commons was “efficient” as opposed to “dignified,” and, so far as the
traditional structures of government allowed, ran the country essentially as a
business corporation.
The propertied classes were (in a sense) the shareholders
of the national corporation. Common
unpropertied people, as well as aristocrats whose wealth and power were in
decline as agriculture diminished in relative importance, were to some extent
supernumeraries, that is, redundant employees and pensioners of the national
corporate State. “Corporate State” can
be taken here both as meaning a nation run as a private business enterprise for
the benefit of the economic and financial élite,
even if ostensibly for the benefit of all citizens — whom Bagehot held in open
contempt — or as a proto fascist State preliminary to the Servile State, an
almost inevitable outcome when the “slavery of past savings” is the basis of
the economic order.
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| The end result of Bagehot's concept of "democracy." |
The House of Commons, elected by a relatively small number
of voters, was, essentially, the board of directors of the country, “a class .
. . trained to thought, full of money, and yet trained to business.” (Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution. Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press,
1997, 66.) In other words, the governing
body of the British Empire was a carbon copy of the owners and upper management
of the Great East India Company, a private enterprise that governed India for
the Crown until 1858, eight years before Bagehot wrote The English Constitution . . . until the Great Mutiny (1857-1858)
brought the system crashing down.
Contrary to his assertion that ultimate power resided in
the House of Commons, Bagehot did not support popular sovereignty. The electorate at the time he wrote, 1867,
was still extremely small, and — like the Church of England at the time of the
Oxford Movement — composed exclusively of men of property, a financial élite which thereby secured a
self-perpetuating political power — the “pocket borough” system. This was only right as far as Bagehot was
concerned. He believed that the masses
were too stupid to be able to vote or do anything other than take orders:
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| Bagehot's view of ordinary (i.e., non-owning) people. |
We have in a great community like England crowds of people
scarcely more civilized than the majority of two thousand years ago; we have
others, even more numerous, such as the best people were a thousand years
since. The lower orders, the middle
orders, are still, when tried by what is the standard of the educated ‘ten
thousand’, narrow-minded, unintelligent, incurious. (Ibid., 6.)
We have whole classes unable to comprehend the idea of a
constitution. (Ibid., 23.)
A free nation rarely can be — and the English nation is not —
quick of apprehension. (Ibid., 74.)
According to Bagehot, “The principle of popular government
is that the supreme power, the determining efficacy in matters political,
resides in the people — not necessarily or commonly in the whole people, in the
numerical majority, but in a chosen
people, a picked and selected people.” [Emphasis in original.] (Ibid.,
17.) Not surprisingly, one of the “defects”
Bagehot listed in the American system is the impossibility of a dictatorship in
times of national emergency. (Ibid., 20.) Another problem is that Americans do not
accept the opinions of their betters without question: “They have not a public
opinion finished and chastened as that of the English has been finished and chastened.” (Ibid.,
13.)
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| Bagehot's view of a capitalist. |
Natural rights, the judiciary, — such things are
ignored. They are unimportant because
they are not “efficient,” that is, they do not increase the effectiveness of
government, the purpose of which is to protect the interests of the propertied
classes who run the country and thus the status
quo, whatever it might be.
Weaknesses appear in government to the extent that the State
administration departs from the principles of business, e.g., lack of efficient structure, unnecessary redundancy, etc.
The fact that many of these structures were at least initially intended
to provide accountability to the citizens is irrelevant.
Any more than the Anglican clergyman of the 1830s, the
capitalist of Bagehot’s day — or, more accurately, the non-owning manager — was
not accountable to his workforce or his customers. It therefore made perfect sense to Bagehot
that the government should not be accountable to the citizens it governed.
Bagehot did not appear to understand that the State is not
a business corporation owned by a small capitalist élite, any more than a religion is run for the benefit of its
clergy. While principles of sound
business (as opposed to the structures that have grown up to support and
protect capitalism and socialism) can be applied in government to great
advantage, ultimately there comes a parting of the ways. A business corporation exists to make a
profit and benefit the individual workers, shareholders, and customers. A government exists to keep order and care
for the common good; it is not an enterprise to be run for individual benefit
or profit. A religion exists to help
people live moral lives and prepare for their proper end, whatever it might be.
By focusing solely on what was expedient (“efficient”),
Bagehot dismissed the importance of personal sovereignty and the dignity of the
human person, the protection and development of which is the ultimate
justification for government or religion.
When a government or a religion undermines or goes against the dignity
of every person or does not respect that of various individuals or groups by
securing to them their natural rights, that government dissolves the contract
that binds its citizens to it, and the religion can lose its legitimacy in the
eyes of believers. This in turn
justifies a change in rulers, or even in the form of government, or a change in
religion or even elimination of all religion.
This, then, not mere indifference in religion, was what
faced the Oxford Movement, as it did all traditional Christian bodies at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. How
they met the challenge is, within limits, a textbook case of how to deal with
flawed institutions: acts of social justice.
#30#
