Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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The threat, curiously enough, came not from outside but from within. At the

very time when the minimal, decentralized, regulatory, laissez-faire State of the

entrepreneurial ideal was consolidating itself as the norm of political theory, the

expanding, centralized, bureaucratic, interventionist State of modern times was

coming into being in administrative practice. The reason for this was the role of

its ally and instrument, the professional ideal, in the second phase of the battle

for the State, the struggle for administrative reform.

THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF GOVERNMENT

In the struggle between the ideals so far the entrepreneurial ideal had won partly

because it had the assistance of the professional ideal in its most powerful and

best organized form. Indeed, in the Benthamites and Classical Economists the two

ideals seemed to be indistinguishable. In the battles for morality, for public

opinion, and for political control of the State, the professional ideal of a

functional society based on expertise and selection by merit was almost

interchangeable with the entrepreneurial ideal of a class society based on capital

and competition. In the final battle, to decide the structure of the administrative

system, they seemed at first sight to be identical. The cheap and efficient

government demanded by the entrepreneurial ideal could only be provided by

expert professional administrators selected by merit. As allies they conquered,

achieving in the creation of the modern bureaucratic administrative machine and

the new civil service qualified and finally selected by examination a clearer-cut

victory than in Parliamentary Reform. Yet in the process the professional ideal

began to diverge from its ally, and the administrative system which resulted was

so different from the minimal, non-interventionist State of the entrepreneurial

ideal as almost to be its mirror-image.

At first, however, the two ideals worked closely together, often in the same

persons. Together—with the help of those aristocratic statesmen like Peel and

Gladstone whom they won to their views—they worked a revolution in

government which was as much a consequence of industrialism and urbanization

as the rise of class itself. Under the pressure of social problems not new but of

unprecedented scale, interpreted and found ‘intolerable’ by the light of the belief

in the possibility of ‘improvement’ common to both, they demanded and

obtained the creation of a series of administrative agencies staffed by experts

capable of solving them. In these and the existing government departments they

demanded, and to a large extent obtained, the abolition of patronage and

‘corruption’, of amateurism and inefficiency, extravagance and waste, secrecy

and lack of accountability, and their replacement by selection and promotion by

P.Magnus, Gladstone (1963 ed.), p. 178.

See below, chap. ix, § 3.

264 TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

merit, by professional efficiency, retrenchment and economy, publicity and full

financial accountability. And they made some headway towards the

transformation of the old multifarious collection of ‘persons in public offices’,

chiefly the personal appointees and dependants of individual ministers, into a

modern, integrated civil service, recruited by an impersonal central agency

chiefly for their ability or expertise, and owing loyalty not to any individual but

to the State as a whole, or at least to the State bureaucracy to which they

belonged.

Yet this revolution in government, by its very extent and success, was itself

designed to sever the two ideals and set them at loggerheads. The entrepreneurial

ideal was the more easily satisfied by the negative aspects of the revolution: by

the destruction of patronage, by efficiency and economy interpreted as cheap

government, the smallest possible departmental staffs, and low taxation, and by

the reduction of central government intervention in the relations between

individuals to the roles of umpire and policeman. For the professional ideal, on

the other hand, it was the positive aspects which were important: selection of

talent and expertise, efficiency and economy interpreted as the effective solution

of social problems and the abolition of waste arising from social and

administrative neglect, and the extension of government as and where necessary

to meet the social demands upon it. The former ideal was satisfied by the

minimal, regulatory, decentralized, laissez-faire State of Victorian theory. The

latter pressed on towards the expanding, bureaucratic, centralized,

interventionalist State of Victorian practice.

Theory was not altogether divorced from practice, but as ever it lagged far

behind. In the organicist tradition of social theory, of course, laissez-faire was

consistently belaboured by professional thinkers like Coleridge, Southey, Carlyle,

Thomas Arnold, and the Christian Socialists.

But they were influential, if at all,

only in modifying the dominant theory of laissez-faire from the outside, in the

direction of such mild incursions as the State regulation of child labour,

supported in any case by the Benthamites and Classical Economists. The

important theoretical rift between the ideals came within Benthamism itself,

which for so long had united them, above all in this very battle for more efficient

government.

We have already noticed that those professional spokesmen for the

entrepreneurial ideal, the Classical Economists McCulloch, Senior, and the

young J.S.Mill, like Bentham himself, were never unequivocal supporters of

laissez-faire, and indeed repudiated it as a universal principle.

In fact the rift

goes back to Bentham and beyond, to the very heart of the Utilitarian

philosophy. In Bentham’s own thought and in Utilitarianism in general, as

Halévy has shown, there was a fundamental ambiguity: between the natural

Cf. Dicey, op. cit., pp. 214–16.

Cf. chap. vii, § 1, above; and Robbins, op. cit., pp. 43–6.

TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 265

harmony of individual interests in society, independent of government action,

and the artificial harmony of interests, produced by government intervention.

Was the greatest happiness of the greatest number to be gained by leaving men

alone to pursue their own interests with the minimum of government

interference; or was government interference necessary to its achievement?

Adam Smith inclined to the first view, though insisting on the necessity of some

government, to ‘hold the ring’ and see fair play between the rival interests;

Bentham to the second, though anxious in view of the ‘natural’ tendency of

governments to corruption to restrict the actual amount of intervention in

practice. By such conditionals the centrifugal tendencies of Utilitarianism were

held in check, and the two ideals could live cheek by jowl, even in the same

thinker.

But the revolution in government was to pull them apart. The reformers of

government were all equally ‘Benthamite’, consciously or unconsciously, in that

they all aimed through efficient, economical, professional government at the

greatest happiness of the greatest number, but the ‘pressure of facts’, the size and

intractability of certain social problems and their failure to respond to laissez-

faire methods of administration, forced the reformers to choose between the

ambiguities of Utilitarianism, between efficient government and cheap

government, between more government and less.

It would be foolish, not to say illogical, to pretend that all the entrepreneurs

chose one way and all the professional men the other. The whole purpose of an

ideal was to sublimate the interest of a class and present it in a form acceptable to

men of other classes. Nevertheless, there was a strong tendency for business men

to opt for the natural identity of interests, the free play of market forces, and as

little government interference as possible, and an increasing tendency, when they

were forced to choose by the exigencies of urgent problems, for the professional

men to opt for the artificial identity of interests, the limiting of market forces on

behalf of ‘higher’ values such as health or education, and as much government

intervention as was necessary to meet the case.

Thus Cobden and Bright and their entrepreneurial friends in the Financial and

Administrative Reform Associations from 1848 onwards never wavered in their

demand for cheap government and low taxes. Meanwhile, in the academic

economists and civil servants the seed of doubt in the universal benevolence of

laissez-faire grew into a sizeable tree of disaffection. John Stuart Mill as early as

1833 thought that the laissez-faire ‘principle, like other negative ones, has work

to do yet, work, namely, of a destroying kind, & I am glad to think it has strength

left to finish that, after which it must soon expire: peace be with its ashes when it

does expire, for I doubt much whether it will reach the resurrection.’

McCulloch

in 1848 thought that although the principle of individual self-reliance should be

Cf. E.Halévy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (1952), Part III, chap. i, esp. pp.

370–2.

266 TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

followed as a general rule, ‘the economist or the politician who should propose

carrying it out to its full extent in all cases and at all hazards, would be fitter for

Bedlam than for the closet or the cabinet.’

Senior, as we have seen, went even

further:

It is the duty of a government to do whatever is conducive to the welfare of

the governed. The only limit to this duty is power…. It appears to me that

the most fatal of all errors would be the general admission of the

proposition that a government has no right to interfere for any purpose

except that of affording protection, for such an admission would be

preventing us from profiting from experience, and even from acquiring it.

This transition, in economists and public servants so orthodox as McCulloch and

Senior, was remarkable enough, but it was in Mill that the complete theoretical

evolution from laissez-faire to State intervention took place. In 1848 he still

thought that ‘Letting alone…should be the general practice: every departure from

it, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil,’ and he let this stand in

later editions of the Principles, but with increasing qualifications in favour of

departures from it:

In the particular circumstances of a given age or nation, there is scarcely

anything, really important to the general interest, which it may not be

desirable, or even necessary, that the government should take upon itself,

not because private individuals cannot effectually perform it, but because

they will not.

In public he became increasingly unwilling to support laissezfaire, repudiating it

when appealed to in the House of Commons in 1865 with the words, ‘I do not

know a single practical rule [of political economy] that must be applicable in all

cases’

In private, however, his views had evolved so far under the influence of his

wife, Harriet Taylor, that he considered himself a Socialist:

our ideal of ultimate government went far beyond Democracy, and would

class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we

repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the

individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve, we yet

looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the

F.E.Mineka, ed., The Earlier Letters of J.S.Mill, 1812–48 (1963), I. 152.

J.R.McCulloch, Principles of Political Economy (1825), preface; Robbins, op. cit., p.

44.

N.W.Senior, Oxford Lectures, 1847–48, in Industrial Efficiency and Social Economy

(ed. S.L.Levy, 1929), II. 302; Robbins, op. cit., p. 45.

TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 267

idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not

eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the

division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a

degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an

accepted principle of justice, and when it will no longer either be, or be

thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously

in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be

shared with the society they belong to. The social problem of the future we

considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with

a common ownership of the raw material of the globe, and an equal

participation of all in the benefits of combined labour.

If, as Beatrice Webb recognized, Bentham was the spiritual ancestor of the

Fabians, Mill, the evolutionary link between Benthamite and Fabian

Utilitarianism, was surely their intellectual godfather.

Or, rather, he would have

been if Harriet Taylor had lived longer and given him the courage to declare

himself in public. As it was, he and his numerous disciples, especially his

kindergarten of academic economists, Cairnes, Cliffe Leslie, Nicholson, Thorold

Rogers, Fawcett, and the rest, never got beyond the sort of mildly collectivist

Radicalism which was compatible with unqualified support of Gladstone and the

Liberal Party.

As it was, too, Dicey—himself both a bigoted individualist and a disciple of Mill

—was unable or unwilling to father on to Mill, as he had fathered the

‘Legislative Quiescence’ of the period before the first Reform Act on to

Blackstone and the ‘Individualism’ of the period between the first two Reform

Acts on to Bentham, responsibility for the legislative ‘Collectivism’ which he

saw as the dominant policy, and the bane, of the last third of the nineteenth century.

And for the purpose of understanding the Victorian revolution in government

and social policy this is just as well, for Mill, like Blackstone and Bentham, was

responding belatedly to changes which were already occurring in the practice of

government and legislation. The transition from laissez-faire to State

intervention was not a moment of time when one theory of legislation took over

from another, but the long-drawn-out evolution of a new legislative and

administrative practice, by the gradual segregation of the two allied but

increasingly rival ideals, and the growing domination in the governors and

administrators themselves of the entrepreneurial by the professional ideal. It is at

the practical rather than the theoretical level, therefore, that the key to the

transition must be sought.

Mill, Principles, pp. 573, 590.

D.H.McGregor, Economic Thought and Policy (1949), pp. 86–7.

Mill, Autobiography, p. 196.

B.Webb, Our Partnership, p. 210.

268 TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

The professional ideal, it was suggested in the last chapter, contributed in two

ways to the process of practical social reform.

On the humanitarians and

Radicals who initiated the process by discovering social problems and finding

them ‘intolerable’, it operated indirectly, by providing professional methods and

standards of criticism and suggesting professional solutions. On the professional

administrators who had to apply those solutions in the shape of government

control and inspection, it operated directly, through their professional concern to

identify the real causes of the problems and to modify and extend the legislation

and administrative machinery to meet them. Now it is time to look in rather more

detail at this process, and in particular at the part played by professional men

both in the scientific study of society and social problems and in the

professionalization of government.

The scientific study of society goes back to the Scientific Revolution of the

seventeenth century and ‘political arithmetic’ —and, significantly, to the academic

Sir John Graunt and the civil servant Gregory King—but it only came into its own

as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, its most important tool, statistics,

is to industrialism what written language was to early civilization: at once its

product and its means of self-expression—hence the inadequacy of contemporary

descriptions of both, which are like the autobiographies of infants learning to

speak. The first attempts were heroic compilations like Sir John Sinclair’s

Statistical Account of Scotland (1791) and Patrick Colquhoun’s Treatise on the

Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire (1814), but the real

breakthrough came only in the 1830’s, with the establishment of the Statistical

Office of the Board of Trade and the Registrar-General’s Office in 1837, and the

founding of the Statistical Section of the British Association in 1833, and of

Statistical Societies in all the major cities, beginning with Manchester and

London in 1833 and 1834, designed ‘to collect, digest, and publish facts

illustrating the condition and prospects of society, in its material, social and

moral relations.’ The Societies believed in the empirical method:

in the business of social science principles are valid for application

inasmuch as they are legitimate inductions from facts, accurately observed

and methodically qualified;

Cf. J.E.Cairnes, ‘Political Economy and the Land’, Fortnightly Review, 1870, XIII, 41;

T.E.Cliffe Leslie, The Land Systems and Industrial Economy of Ireland, England and

Continental Countries (1870), and review by Mill in ibid., XIII. 641; J.S.Nicholson,

Tenant’s Gain not Landlord’s Loss (Edinburgh, 1883), p. 163; J.E.T.Rogers, ‘Economy

and Trade: Some aspects of Laissez-faire and State Control’, Stat.J. 1883, XLVI. 646;

H.Fawcett, ‘The Nationalization of the Land’, Fortnightly Review, 1872, XVIII. 627f.

Dicey, op. cit., passim.

See above, chap. vii, § 4.

TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 269

and they applied it to an immense range of social problems from illiteracy and

crime to slum housing and industrial strikes.

The Statistical Societies were a symptom of what Bulwer Lytton in 1833

called ‘an immense intellectual revolution…. Today everybody is looking for

what needs mending.’

They were also laboratories for the discovery and

examination of ‘intolerable’ facts, often long before they were felt to be

intolerable by the press and public opinion. Thorold Rogers told the London

Society in 1863:

One of the greatest advantages which the members of this Society possess…

is that of discussing on purely abstract and scientific grounds the principles

on which economic facts are founded, the effect of social practices, and the

speculative consequences which might ensue from the removal or

modification of rules in action which are so habitual, as not to be out of the

prejudice of men obviously capable of actual alteration…

In other words, if economic facts and social practices did not square with the

theory of laissez-faire the Societies were prepared to discuss changing the theory,

and discussion had in fact made it possible in particular cases to change the

practice:

The adoption of a limitation on the hours of labour, of the sex employed in

some kinds of labour, of the half-time system in the work and education of

children, of the principle that able-bodied labour should not be ordinarily

relieved except under the regulation of a workhouse, and a variety of other

economical reforms, have, I understand, been discussed before this society

in a grave and unprejudiced manner, long before they have been

approached as practical questions either by legislation or by the popular

press.

When the facts and practices were found intolerable and agitation and action

were demanded, the problem became the concern of other bodies such as the

education pressure groups or the Health of Towns Association. But the

contribution of the Statistical Societies in throwing the first light into dark

corners should not be underestimated.

The professionalism of these Societies inhered in their aims and methods

rather than their membership, which included a cross-section of the politically

influential classes. Lord Lansdowne chaired and Henry Goulburn and Spring

Stat.J., 1838, I, Introduction, pp. 1–5; 4th Annual Report, pp. 5–9; and ‘Provincial

Societies in U.K.’, pp. 48–50, 115–17; cf. also Annals of Royal Statistical Society, 1834–

1934 (1934), chap. i, and T.S.Ashton, Economic and Social Investigations in Manchester,

1833–1933 (Manchester, 1934), chap. i.

270 TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

Rice attended the inaugural meeting of the London Society. But a particularly

significant group of members were the civil servants with access to official

statistics and information: G.R.Porter and James Deacon Hume of the Board of

Trade, Kay-Shuttleworth of the Poor Law Commission and the Privy Council

Committee on Education, William Farr and Horace Mann of the General

the Factory Inspector, Joseph Fletcher of the Education Inspectorate, John Simon

of the Privy Council Medical Department, and the ubiquitous Edwin Chadwick,

to mention only the most prominent. Civil servants not only contributed many of

the most valuable papers: they used the societies as a platform for urging their

own policies, and even as pressure groups to bring public opinion to bear upon

their own political chiefs. Thus Porter and Deacon Hume continually pressed

their own programme of free trade and repeal of the corn laws on successive

governments, Joseph Fletcher his ideas on penal reform and industrial schools,

Leonard Horner his demands for increased safety in factories and extension of

the factory acts, Chadwick his system of arterial water supply and drainage, and

Simon his insistence on medical control and inspection of the local sanitary

authorities. They were not above stimulating artificial ‘pressure from without’ to

further internal departmental moves, as Simon, for example, more than once

stimulated the Social Science Association, the B.M.A., the Medical Officers’

Association, not to say The Times and the Pall Mall Gazette.

It was within doors, however, that the great pioneering civil servants had most

effect on the revolution in government, and it on them. While most business men

and a great many professional men out of doors found little reason for changing

their basic laissez-faire assumptions, until driven to it in particular cases by the

revelation of intolerable facts, the civil servants, however doctrinaire the

assumptions with which they began, had thrust upon them the educative task of

revealing the facts and of seeing the accepted remedies for them repeatedly fail.

It was not they, of course, who in most cases originally found a social problem so

intolerable that it required the attention of the State, though it might justly be said

that it was Chadwick and his medical assistants at the Poor Law Board, Arnott,

Kay and Southwood Smith, who thrust the public health problem before the

public. In most cases that was the work of spontaneous pressure groups to which

present and future civil servants might belong, like the classical economists in

relation to the old Poor Law, Sadler and company in relation to factory

conditions, the Benthamites and Dissenters in relation to popular education, and

so on. Yet once an inquiry requiring professional research or assistance was

A.de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland (ed. J.P.Meyer, 1958), p. 56.

J.E.T.Rogers, ‘On the Rationale and Working of the Patent Laws’, Stat.J., 1863, XXVI.

121.

Royston Lambert, Sir John Simon, 1816–1904, and English Social Administration (1963),

pp. 300, 373, 611, and passim.

TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 271

mounted or an act passed creating professional machinery for dealing with a

problem, a process of ‘factual enlightenment’ began for the responsible

professionals to which the original movers of reform had access only at second

hand.

The most famous example of this process of factual enlightenment is that of

Edwin Chadwick. Chadwick began as the most doctrinaire of laissez-faire

Benthamites, firmly uniting both tendencies, the demand for non-interference

with the labour market and the demand for efficient government to solve the

problem of excessive poverty, in the Report of the 1832 Poor Law Commission

which he wrote with Nassau Senior. As Secretary of the Poor Law Board he and

his medical Assistant Commissioners, Drs. Arnott, Kay and Southwood Smith,

soon discovered that there were vast causes of poverty not touched by the Report

or its remedies, the workhouse test and less eligibility, in particular the enormous

human misery, loss of work and earnings, and waste of industrial production

caused by ill health and unnecessary deaths arising from insanitary and

overcrowded housing, foul drainage, dirty and inadequate water supply,

overflowing burial grounds, public nuisances from manure heaps, slaughter-

houses and the like, and noxious industrial processes. Their work, culminating in

Chadwick’s great Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population

of Great Britain (1842), was at once the first great national, empirical social survey

and the chief stimulus and starting point of the Victorian public health

movement. The Report established both statistically and through case histories

the correlation between insanitary living and working conditions and disease and

high mortality, calculated the economic and social costs of ill health, and

demonstrated the inadequacy of existing law and administration to solve the

problem. It led directly to the Health of Towns Commission and its still more

systematic and wide-ranging reports, the first (1844) mostly written by Chad

wick and the second (1845) influenced by him, and to the public agitation headed

by the Health of Towns Association (1844) which produced the first Public

Health Act, 1848, and the Public Health Board, with Chadwick and South wood

Smith along with Lord Ashley as Commissioners.

This was perhaps the greatest example of what, in the language of cybernetics,

may be called ‘feedback’, the reaction of the administrative machine upon itself

and its controllers to produce new policy and machinery. That in the short term it

failed, with the dismissal of Chadwick and the virtual collapse of the Board in

1854, followed by its abolition in 1858, was due to Chadwick’s aggressive

personality and (in spite of his empirical re-education) doctrinaire attachment to

his dogmatic sanitary principles, and to the fierce opposition he provoked from

the defenders of threatened property interests and the equally doctrinaire

opponents of centralization. Their confrontation was a paradigm of the severance

and internecine conflict of the once conjoint ideals, the one demanding non-

interference with capital and profits, whatever the social cost, the other the

mitigation of social waste and misery, whatever the fiscal and administrative

burden. For the moment, the entrepreneurial ideal and the dominant theory of

272 TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

laissez-faire and decentralization triumphed, but, as we shall see in a moment,

the professional ideal and administrative practice were to have the last word.

Chadwick had already had a hand in other examples of the feedback process,

and was to be involved in yet more. He rarely originated the study of a particular

social problem, but he often ‘fed back’ a professional solution (not always, of

course, the right one). Before he entered government service he had produced the

memorandum on police for Peel’s Committee and his famous ‘preventive Police’

article of 1829, which, as well as earning him the friendship of Bentham, had

some influence on the origins of the professional police force. From then onwards,

in and out of office, he continually pressed his views on the Home Office,

culminating in his 1839 Report of the Constabulary Commissioners and the 1839

Act to extend the new police to the provinces. As a member of the 1833 Factory

Commission with Thomas Tooke and Southwood Smith, he drew up the Report

which led to the first effective Factory Act, 1833, with the all-important

provision for central government inspection. He suggested the provisions in the

1836 Registration Act making registration districts co-extensive with the Poor

Law Unions and requiring the recording of the cause of death, thus making the

statistics not only more useful for public health purposes but an important source

of further ‘feedback’ reform, under Chadwick himself at the Board of Health,

and later under Simon at the Privy Council Medical Department.

The same process of factual enlightenment and feedback operated through

Chadwick’s colleagues, friends and rivals. Kay and Tufnell, Assistant

Commissioners at the Poor Law Board, began under Chadwick their inquiries

into pauper education which were to lead to the setting up, under an Act of 1848,

of the district schools, those gigantic boarding schools for the children of the poor

which were the real beginning of State provision in education, and to the same

men’s contributions to State-aided education for the non-pauper working class,

notably the setting up of the Privy Council Education Inspectorate and the

Battersea Normal School for the training of teachers.

William Farr and Horace Mann of the General Register Office transformed the

decennial Census into an indispensable tool of government in an enormous range

of problems, from housing to education, and the Census Reports into masterly

social and economic surveys of the nation, laced with gratuitous comments on

current social philosophy and the direction of government policy. The 1851

Report, for example, contains an able critique and empirical refutation of

Malthus, and a section on ‘Defective Education of the People’ beginning, ‘Every

British child should unquestionably be taught reading, writing and the elements

of knowledge…’; while that for 1871 refers, in terms anticipatory of the Welfare

State, to the poor law as ‘that national institution, which, with all its defects, is a

Cf. Flinn, Introduction to Chadwick, op. cit., pp. 66–73.

Cf. S.E.Finer, Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (1952), pp. 29–31, 50–68, 124–7,

164–80; Jenifer Hart, op. cit., Past and Present, 1965, No. 31, p. 42.

TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 273