In thk spirit of weber than it is in London. The size and scale of applied social research is also very different ... [The] United States spends between 10 and 20 times as much on social research as Britain. Proportional to population, it spends 2 V2 to five times as much ... British policy-making places much more weight upon practical experience in the conduct of affairs. Not for nothing are judges one of the favourite sources of chairmen for governmental commissions. WilliamJames, once made a distinction between ‘knowledge about’ based upon research, theorising and rational thought, and ‘acquaintance with’, learned first-hand in the manner of an apprentice. While the American system puts more reliance upon the former, the British systememphasises the latter. Thus the empirical”, anti-theoretical, highly vocational tendencies within English legal culture seemingly mirrors a wider bias within British cultural life. Finally, there is the peculiar form of the British state. Despite the early centralisation of the British state, the state in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain was not a highly centralised, rational monolith. The law, “... along with many other political and economic functions, continued in large part to be located at a local level ... This dichotomy (local/central) within the state structure provides ... [a] principal axis along which” conflicts over law, state, society and economy are to be understood.For instance, in the nineteenth century, the imperatives of local political and financial administration hindered the creation of a national police force and prison system.'"*- Britain’s head of state still has to be drawn fromone family.'"*^ And a whole house of the legislature is hereditary or appointive. 249 ”140 The Historical Record: Some Conclusions The historical record provides vivid support for Weber’s stress on the relatively irrational character of the English legal system. These “pre-modern” M. Bulmcr, “Pity the Poor Cousins”, Times Higher Education Supplement, 23 January 140 1987, p. 13. '■*' R. Hogg, “Imprisonment and Society under early British capitalism”. Crime and Social Justice. No. 12, 1979, pp. 4-17, p. 7. See, generally, B. Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977); G. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State. (London: Hutchinson, 1978); B. Supple, “The State and the Industrial Revolution 1700-1914”, in C.M. Cipolla, (ed.). The Industrial Revolution 1700-1914 (London: Fontana, 1976); C. Tilly, “Reflections on the Historv of European Statemaking” in C. Tilly, (ed.); The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). '■*- See, for example, M. Ignaticff, AJust Measure of Pain, (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 95-109 and D. Philips, Grime and Authority in Victorian England (London: CroomHelm), pp. 53-95. '•*' On the invention and elaboration of British royal “traditions” in the 19th and 20th centuries, sec D. Gannadine, The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, c. 1820-1977”, in Hohsbawn and Ranger, (eds.), op cit., pp. 101-164.
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