In the spirit of weber 247 argument, this was responsible for Britain’s industrial decline.*3° Indeed, Weiner argued that English culture has tended to be hostile to industrialisation and economic growth. In Weberian terms, despite the rise of the middle classes, English culture remained relatively pre-modern. Other aspects of the cultural history of modern England would seemto lend support to Weiner’s thesis. For example, the place attributed to science within English civilisation was more uncertain, more controversial and ultimately more marginal than elsewhere. As Hollinger points out, in Britain, unlike the United States, “... the effort to define science morally took place in a setting of much sharper rivalries between a new scientific elite and the older, established elite’s of religion and education. The newscientific elite in England were more of a party than their American counterparts and faced, especially after 1859, a more extensive and sustained opposition to their claims. One of the distinctive features of modern English history is the retention of power and social supremacy of the landed elite until at least the end of the nineteenth century. Landed influence survived the Great ReformAct of 1832 and the repeal of the Corn Laws. As late as 1880, two-thirds of Members of Parliament were landed gentry or sons of peers. Decline in landed power and influence only really began at the end of the nineteenth century. We might also note the importance of secular religions, of religion-substitutes, in Victorian England. The pathos of the Victorians’ intellectual rejection of religion, and the surrogates that replaced it, have been admirably sur- ”131 No. 23, 1964, pp. 15-42. The separation of capital from industry may be crucial here. For an important, new study, see G. Ingham, Capital Divided?: The City and Industry in British Social Development, (London: Macmillan, 1984). M.J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). cf. A. Howe, The Cotton .Masters, 1830-60, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), for an important effort to establish the distinctiveness of urban haute bourgeois culture in England. D. A. Hollinger, Inquiry and Uplift: Late 19th Century American Academies and the Moral Efficacy of Scientific Practice”, in T. L. Haskell (ed.). The Authority of Experts, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 142-56, pp. 152-3 and the sources there cited. F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the 19th Century, (London: Routledge, 1963); W.L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite (London: Macgibbon Kee, 1963); F. M. L. Thompson, “’The Mighty and their Seats”, the Times Literary Supplement, 7 September 1584, p. 190. Recent work on the English aristocracy has argued that their distinctiveness has been exaggerated; and that they were basically similar to their Continental cousins. This revisionism questions the supposedly “peculiar” nature of English social development. See, J. K. Powis, Aristocracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) and M. L. Bush, The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis, (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1984). A. J. Mayer has argued that a “thoroughly pre-industrial and pre-bourgeois” landed elite dominated Europe until the early twentieth century: The Persistence of the Old Regime, (London: CroomHelm, 1982). Unfortunately, his contradictory use of “old regime” and his numerous qualifications illustrate that either/or notions of a bourgeois/old regime dominance are too simplistic. 130
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=