Unquestionably this causes resentment, and in some ways, therefore, the French, who got rid of the privileged status of their aristocracy in the eighteenth century by cutting off their heads, and the Americans, who never had such an aristocracy in the first place, are now less upset by the idea of aristocracy than the British. So much is readily admitted in this essay. In today’s climate a de jure privileged aristocracy with titles of nobility and places in parliament may be an enemy of de facto hereditary aristocracy, which merges so imperceptibly into the ranks of meritocracy as not to present any visible target on which doctrinal egalitarians can train their guns. So it could well be that the idea of aristocracy in Britain would be strengthened rather than weakened by the removal of their legal privileges.
In any case, as this essay also tries to show, the role of the hereditary aristocracy in British history was so massive and splendid that it cannot – much as it might like to – just fold up its tents and fade away. The public and media won’t let it. It is still too much part of ‘us’; too deeply embedded in the nation’s literature and culture; indeed in the national consciousness itself. What is more, its code of gentlemanly behaviour, which was eventually adopted by substantial elements in all classes, came to enjoy the status of a sub-Christian cult, exercising on many (for whom the demands of Christianity were too arduous) a more direct influence for good than did Christianity proper. So although in theory it might be wonderful to replace aristocratic deference with civic republicanism, that is most unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. What is much more likely to happen – indeed is already happening – is the replacement of aristocratic deference, not by civic republican pride, but by something much more like egalitarian hypocrisy at the top and proletarian rancour at the bottom.
Plainly, therefore, some opening of minds is needed. Reactionary supporters of the class system, if there are any left, must understand how offensive it is to contemporary public opinion for the State to reserve positions of power and influence at the top of society – in the House of Lords, for example – for men and women whose individual talents would not otherwise justify them holding these positions. Most anti-egalitarians, I would imagine, have now conceded this point. But most egalitarians, unfortunately, are still as far as ever from opening their minds to the no less important truth that for the power of the State to be used to create a wholly classless society is equally objectionable. By a classless society* they presumably mean one in which those running things in the present have no association with those who ran them in the past; in which those running things are all drawn from families who have not themselves been running things; a society, that is, in which the only social distinction officially approved of is the one separating the minority that is running things (i.e. the elites) from the majority who are not running things (i.e. the masses). While such a society would certainly do away with individuals enjoying positions at the top of society to which their inherent talents do not qualify them – a marginally desirable development – it would also mean that the social space at the top occupied by those who deserved to be at the top would be demoralizingly barren and thin – a fundamentally undesirable development. A state-sponsored classless society would be an atomized society. It doesn’t bear thinking about. In other words, there ought always to be a social space at the top of society in which vestiges of the past (elites emeritus, so to speak) remain. Otherwise life at the top will be horribly nasty, brutish, and short, with grim consequences for life at every other social level.
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