The State by Anthony de Jasay (14 page)

1. At least in the early part of the century, the anti-capitalist drift of the reform movement certainly did not come from some clever calculation on the part of the state that there was more support to be gained on the "left" than lost on the "right." In terms of the pre1832 electoral arithmetic, this would have been dubious reckoning anyway. Up to the 1885 electoral reform if not beyond it, the main political benefit of taking sides with the labouring poor was derived not from getting their votes, but those of the progressive professional middle class. The earliest pro-labour legislation pleased above all the squirearchy and beyond it those magnates who particularly despised the money-grubbing of the mill-owners and their unconcern for the welfare of the millhands and their families. Sadler, Oastler and Ashley (Lord Shaftesbury) were imbued with righteous animosity towards the manufacturers, Sadler's 1831-2 Select Committee on Factory Children's Labour producing one of the most virulent anti-industry tracts ever.
   
 

2. The capitalist defence was characteristically inept. With the passage of time, as and when state policy helped the poor at the expense of the rich, it was both to help the poor and to please some altruistic or envious third party-the concerned middle class reared on Philosophical Radicalism (and, once or twice, just a certain, inordinately influential Master of Balliol). Even when broad popular support became a more clearly recognized and avowed objective, the state may have often been pushed farther by
   

articulate middle- and upper-class opinion than could be warranted by the tangible political advantage to be reaped from some progressive measure. "False consciousness," a ready acceptance (bordering on gullibility) of what the articulate say about the duty of the state in matters of social justice, was seldom absent from tentative forecasts of political profit and loss. Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the relatively quick transformation of the near-minimal Georgian state into a Victorian partisan democracy, an adversary of capital, endowing itself with an autonomous bureaucracy (albeit to a more moderate extent than many other states that were, for various reasons, more powerful and autonomous to begin with), is the mute defeatism with which the capitalist class, instead of drawing confidence from the dominant ideology of the age as it was supposed to do, submitted to the role of political underdog, contenting itself with making good money. Germany had Humboldt, France had Tocqueville to think and express the thoughts that were becoming urgent about the proper limits of the state and the awesome implications of popular sovereignty. England had only Cobden, Bright and Herbert Spencer in this camp. Her major thinkers, in keeping with the utilitarian tradition, in fact prepared the ideological foundations of the adversary state. (Historical circumstance, which gave Jacobinism to France and an adulation of the nation state to Germany, was admittedly much less kind to statism in England, where its ideologists had a relatively hard row to hoe till the last third or so of the century.) Mill, despite his ringing phrases in On Liberty, his mistrust of universal franchise and his dislike of the invasion of liberty by popular government, had no doctrine of restraint upon the state. His pragmatism strongly pulled him the other way. For him, state intervention involving the violation of personal liberties and (to the extent that these are distinct) property rights, was always bad except when it was good. True to his broad utilitarian streak, he was content to judge the actions of the state "on their merits," case by case.

1. The doctrinal impotence of the capitalist interest is nicely illustrated by the course of labour law. English law regarding trade unions went round full circle between 1834 and 1906, from forbidding combinations to restrain competition in both the supply of and the demand for labour, to ultimately legalizing combinations to restrain supply and also exempting them from having to keep contracts when it was inconvenient to do so. Much the same effect favourable to labour could have been achieved in less provocative ways. Violating the principle of equality before the law between capital and labour was, one might have thought, asking for it. Yet there was no worth-while doctrinal capitalist counter-attack, no appeal to first principles, nor to the as-yet uncontested verities of political economy.
   
 

2. The English state, twice almost disarmed vis-à-vis civil society in 1641 and 1688, regained its predominance over private interest on the back of social reform, accomplishing its partisan anti-capitalist turn tentatively and gradually over nearly a century. In Continental Europe, civil society never disarmed the state which remained powerful, in governing apparatus and repressive capacity, even where it was standing on clay feet. The anticapitalist turn as a means of building a base of consent, came rather later in these countries, but it was accomplished more rapidly. The watershed years when capitalism became the political underdog (though very much the top dog financially, becoming acceptable socially and still capable, in the case of such eminences as the Pereira brothers, the James de Rothschilds, the Bleichröders or the J. P. Morgans, to bend back the state to serve capitalist purposes), were either side of 1859 in France, 1862 in the North German Federation and 1900 in the USA.
   
3. It was roughly in 1859 that Napoleon III, in his own eyes a man of the left, began really to rely on the Assembly and to practise the rudiments of parliamentary democracy, and of a particular sort at that: for Guizot and Odilon Barrot were gone from the scene, to be replaced by such men of the radical left as Jules Favre, Jules Ferry and Gambetta, with only the "despicable Thiers" representing continuity of an unlovely kind with the bourgeois monarchy. Striking became legal in 1864 and a proper charter for labour unions, with fringe measures ranging from workers' pensions to price control on bread, was legislated in 1867, Napoleon III taking a sympathetic interest in the encouragement of trade unions. Perhaps coincidentally with his shift toward the politics of consent, he showed a fine disregard for the capitalist interest in throwing open the French iron and steel, engineering and textile industries to the more efficient English and Belgian competition. Sharing the widespread illusion that a nation of shopkeepers will pay for a commercial good turn with such political support as he needed for his transalpine ambitions, in late 1859 he sent Chevalier, an ex-professor of economics with the free-trade convictions that such a calling tends to engender, to Cobden in London; it took the two kindred spirits an hour to negotiate a whole new free-trader tariff, to the furious surprise both of the Minister of Finance and the manufacturers concerned. Though perhaps of no more than anecdotal interest (anyone with a little acquaintance with tariff negotiations can at least smile at the story), the incident is characteristic of the respect the French state had, then as ever, for the interests of its industrialists.
   
 

2.2.10 Another facet of the adversary state which started to matter under the Second Empire and became very important in the Third Republic, was the autonomous evolution of the bureaucracy. The French professional civil service, built by the labours of Colbert,
Louvois, Machault, Maupeou and, in unbroken continuity, by Napoleon, was at first closely entwined with property and enterprise, both because of the negotiability and (initially) relatively high capital value of offices, and of the dual role most of the civil service dynasties played in the royal administration and in the chief capitalist trades of the time, army contracting and tax farming. At the fall of the July Monarchy, in 1848, a regime which was less ambitious than most to dominate society, the civil service was more powerful than ever and, of course, more numerous (Marx noted, as a significant element in his characterization of the Second Empire, that there were 500,000 bureaucrats smothering civil society in addition to 500,000 soldiers), but no longer had much of a proprietorial stake in French industry and little property in general. The estrangement between capital and the bureaucracy was further accentuated in the Third Republic. While the top layer of the civil service was certainly upper-class (to Gambetta's indignation) and continued to be dynastic, such property as it had was mainly in rentes, and it had no understanding of, nor common interest with, entrepreneurial capitalism.

1. Moreover, when in 1906 the emoluments of a député were nearly doubled, the profession of legislator became overnight quite attractive as a living. Till then, whatever was the social and economic background of the civil service, at least on the legislative side, capital, industry and land were strongly represented. From then onward, however, the republic of notables rapidly became, in Thibaudet's oft-cited phrase, a "republic of teachers" which, to judge by the occupational backgrounds of successive French legislatures, it has remained ever since.
   
 

Unlike France, Germany did not have its "bourgeois" revolution (not that it is altogether evident how its history would have been different if it had). Nor did it have its July Monarchy, cheering on the German bourgeoisie to enrich themselves, though (despite their late start around the mid-century) they did not fail to do so for all that. Under the romantic anti-capitalism of Frederick William IV (i.e. till 1858), the Prussian state, while resisting the national liberal ideas imported from the Rhineland, nonetheless cleared up much of the administrative clutter and pointless interference which used to encumber enterprise. This relative economic liberalism was an (albeit minor) enabling cause of the spate of new enterprise which characterized the 1850s. When Bismarck gained the highest office in 1862, the National Liberals had definitely to give up any serious hope of shaping state policy. If it is not too crude to regard them as the party of capital, one can say that their subsequent conduct really signified the acceptance by the capitalist interest of a politically quite subordinate role.

2.2.13 Both directly, and indirectly by harnessing William I's obsession with the army, Bismarck ensured that absolute priority be given to all-German and foreign affairs, almost regardless of the consequent tax burden on industry. The schematic explanation of his freedom of manoeuvre is, of course, his ably managed truce, at times amounting to a downright alliance, with the mainstream of the Social Democrats. A simple, but not for that reason wrong, way to grasp Bismarck's policy is that his remarkably advanced social security and welfare legislation was the price he compelled German capital to pay, to have the domestic calm and consent he needed for the effective pursuit of his priority objectives in foreign policy. The latter was of mixed benefit to German industry and finance. Perhaps more accurately, one might judge that German manufacturing, technically and commercially riding the crest of the wave, could have derived some benefit from
almost any feasible foreign policy of passable competence and continuity, whether active or passive, at least as long as it produced the German customs union. It did not really need more to prosper. Achieving much more than that in foreign policy probably cost it more than it was worth.

2.2.14 Bismarck's fundamental bargain with a vital part of the socialist left and the fiscal exigencies of his foreign policy, however, were not the sole causes of the Prussian state, and later the Second Reich, turning a stern mien to capital. Another reason was the intellectual grip which Kathedersozialismus ("socialism of the professorial chair" and "teachers' socialism" seem equally inadequate renderings)-took upon some of the most ambitious and devoted elements in the civil service, both through formal education and through the influence of the research done within the Verein für Sozialpolitik. If this Verein was more potent, and won its influence sooner, than the Fabians in Britain, its greater initial impact on legislation and regulation was in large part due to the excellence and policy-making latitude of the German civil service. It had a strong tradition, going back to Stein, of not only serving but of actually defining, interpreting the good of the state, and no false modesty about "merely executing" the will of its political masters. If we remember, in addition, that it tended to have little or no fortune and its family roots were mainly in the austere East while those of the representative German capitalist were more to the West or North, we have enough elements for appreciating the Reich's adversary relationship to capital in the era of its greatest organizational and technical success. The breach with Russia, William II's febrile foreign policy and the collision with France and England in 1914 were the culmination of a half-century of policy choices, rational and competently executed at the outset and progressively less so as time went by, in which the narrower interests of German capital were unhesitatingly
sacrificed to the state's own conception of the global national good. This was accomplished with the support of the bulk of social democracy and the labour union movement.

1. The reason, if ever there is a good reason for trying precisely to date historical turnings, for calling Theodore Roosevelt's accession to the Presidency the start of the adversary relation between American government and capital, is mainly that any earlier starting date would include the McKinley years at the White House, about the most obvious antithesis to the thesis I am putting forward. The McKinley-William Jennings Bryan contest was the last time that money alone, against all odds, could get its candidate elected. The closing years of the nineteenth century saw the executive power of the state depending for support, in a way never since seen, on the capitalist interest rather than on the popular appeal of its conduct of affairs. The political colour of Theodore Roosevelt's two terms is all the more of a contrast. His anti-trust, anti-railroad and anti-utility accomplishment is as wide by past standards as it is puny by those of most of his successors. It may be true that his bark was more fierce than his bite, that his true element was demagogy rather than unostentatious achievement, and that his administration in fact represented less of a populist and pro-union tilt, less of a stealing of the Democrats' clothes, than one would judge from its bluster. However, his bark was in the short run perhaps as effective as any bite could have been, to put distance between himself and big business in the eye of the public and to mobilize national support for his purposes.
   
 

2. It is probably fair to say that there has never been an American administration which did not almost exclusively rely on consent to get itself obeyed, unlike some British and Continental European regimes which did not rely on it or did so only a little. Lincoln's