In the past the State has smiled on aristocracy, and in this essay I lovingly adumbrate the benefits this country over the centuries has garnered from an aristocracy so favoured. But I also recognize that smiling on aristocracy, in the present climate, is no longer acceptable. To that degree, egalitarianism must rule. But only to that degree. What must not happen is that the smile should be replaced by a frown; that legal discrimination in favour should be replaced by legal discrimination against. In short, what this essay seeks to help create is a state of public opinion in which the old upper classes and their institutions, shorn of their legal privileges, are once again seen as a source of strength rather than weakness; a blessing rather than a curse; and above all, as ideally suited – rather than exceptionally unsuited – for public service.*
So this essay is not just a lament for the passing away of aristocracy; it is quite as much a plea for it to be given a new and constructive lease of life. For the only way to supersede an aristocracy that has done such historic service as Britain’s has is to incorporate it. Only by continuing to use it, can we go beyond it.*
Others ascribe to me alternately democratic or aristocratic prejudices; perhaps I might have had one or the other if I had been born in another century and in another country. But as it happened, my birth made it very easy for me to guard against both. I came into the world at the end of a long revolution which, after having destroyed the old order, created nothing that could last. When I began my life, aristocracy was already dead, and democracy was still unborn. Therefore, my instincts could not lead me blindly towards one or the other. I have lived in a country which for forty years has tried a little of everything and settled nothing definitively. It was not easy for me, therefore, to have any political illusions … I had no natural hatred or jealousy of the aristocracy and, since that aristocracy had been destroyed, I had no natural affection for it, for one can only be strongly attached to the living. I was near enough to know it intimately, and far enough to judge it dispassionately. I may say as much for the democratic elements…. In a word, I was so nicely balanced between the past and the future that I did not feel instinctively drawn toward the one or the other. It required no great effort to contemplate quietly both sides.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The spark that fired me into writing this essay on the importance of the class system to English democracy was the following paragraph in Richard Hoggart’s final volume of memoirs, First and Last Things.
Democracy is never an abstraction. It has to be rooted in a sense of our own particular culture, of its virtues, strengths, limitations … It arises from the people we have known, loved, respected as we grew up, whether that was among the urban or rural working class, or the conscientious and public-spirited among the middle class, or the upper class.
‘Or the upper class’. Those were the four words that did the trick. For although I knew Mr Hoggart to be a most fair-minded man, I could not stifle the suspicion that he had added them only in a spirit of giving the devil his due – rather as a child feels obliged to add the name of some much disliked gorgon of an aunt to its bedtime supplications. Could he sincerely have believed, I asked myself, that a member of the British upper class had anything useful to contribute on the subject of British democracy except in an apologetic, exculpatory, or at best nostalgic mode? And if Mr Hoggart did so believe, surely he should at least have warned such a person to keep quiet about his own aristocratic provenance, lest readers should dismiss his views as likely to be self-serving and anachronistic, harking back to the ‘good old days’ when everybody knew where they stood but only a privileged few, like himself, enjoyed being there?
But then I had second thoughts. Why on earth should not a member – which I myself in part am – of the very class that, in 1688, created England’s particular kind of democracy, and presided over its glorious destiny for over three hundred years, have something useful to say about its future? True, such a person, with roots in the upper-class culture, would be less qualified than Mr Hoggart, with his roots in the working class, to write about the ‘virtues, strength, limitations’ of English democracy from the bottom-dog perspective of the ruled; but did not that suggest, by the same token, that he would be more qualified to write about them from the equally if not more important top-dog perspective of the rulers?
Democratic top dogs? Is that not a contradiction in terms? Most emphatically not, since this is precisely what English aristocrats were: an organic part of England’s democratic body politic, no more or less an organic part of that body than were the bottom dogs. Was not Winston Churchill, grandson of a Duke, but elected by the people, also, in the English sense, a democrat – someone, like Brutus, prepared to take up arms against tyranny? In England love of freedom, not a lack of quarterings, was and is the true test. Trying to write the aristocratic dimension out of English democracy, therefore, is like trying to write the Prince of Denmark out of Hamlet.
In my youth, of course, they tended to try to do the opposite: to write the working class out of the story. England’s democracy seemed then to consist exclusively of grandees, most with titles. It was a view of democracy from the top downwards. Now, however, the fashionable view is increasingly from the bottom upwards. Thus the success or failure of England’s democracy, which in the old days was largely measured by the statesmanship of its leaders and the standing of the country, is now largely measured by the quality of the man in the street.
In this essay, mindful of Mao’s dictum about the fish rotting from the head downwards, I try to redress the balance, not, I hasten to say, so as to advocate reinstating the upper class – or anything as absurdly reactionary as that – but so as to highlight the gaping hole left in the head of our body politic by its extinction; its extinction, moreover, without any serious thought having been given to how, and with whom, that great empty hole should be filled. From time to time newspaper commentators amuse us by pretending that ‘Tony’s cronies’ have filled the hole. That only shows how little the role of the old ruling class, in the sense that it is used in this essay, is understood.
The difficulty here, I believe, is that ever since the problems created by the Industrial Revolution, political and social thinkers in Britain, as in the rest of the world, have been concerned exclusively with the condition of the tail – the poor and the underprivileged. And quite rightly so since, thanks to the Victorian reforms of the public schools, of Oxbridge, and of the Civil Service, the elites, by the end of the nineteenth century, were in pretty good shape. What so much more obviously and urgently needed attention was the quality of life, moral and material, not of the few but of the many.
Roughly speaking, that still remains the state of play today. While there have been endless studies of the demoralizing effects of inner-city