MIA > Archive > Kidron > Presence of Future
Curious things happened in Europe, England in particular, in the course of the eighteenth century. The impersonal, single-shot, single-purpose transaction between strangers which constitutes the essence of a market broke free from age-old constraints, and took over economic life; God began to be approached on His day, not on any other day; the person one married ceased to be a person one lived near; the space between people became more real than the people themselves; an ‘enough’ society gave way to a ‘more’ or ‘not quite enough’ one.
The transition was catastrophic for most of the people experiencing it. Their family and social networks were torn apart. They were detached from fixed locations and clear identities. Their material life deteriorated. Their moral world, their understandings, their sense of self were damaged, often beyond repair. But for a few the changes amounted to an anastrophe (‘a coming together of disparate elements to form a coherent, connected whole’). For them a new, living creation emerged – the market system – which proved to be more powerful than any that had gone before.
The transition did not come about of itself. It was the outcome of a ferocious war fought on two fronts: a material front (control over the sources of livelihood: land, water, implements, even labour); and a cultural front – control over the concepts and attitudes which govern behaviour.
On the material front clearances and enclosures covering about a third of the land in Britain denied the cultivators their right to use their commons. Overseas, dispossession assumed a scale and a ferocity which made what happened in Britain seem like kindness. It tore fourteen million people from their homes in Africa (including a quarter to a third of the adult male population) and created a racism that disfigures society to this day.
People are still being parted from the means for an independent livelihood. But dispossession is less important now than it was, more a means for mopping-up pockets of resistance than a full-scale war.
The war on the cultural front left fewer mangled bodies (although more maimed minds). The champions of the new order directed their fire at the essence of agrarian living: its attachment to place, its sense of identity, the acceptance of strict norms whether or not they are adhered to, the intolerance of deviance. High spirits and elation became ‘manic’; low spirits were parsed into a thousand ‘depressions’.
Conventional attitudes came in for review. The way to make the poor ‘sober, industrious and obedient’ proclaimed William Temple (1739–1796) was to remove the means of ‘idleness and intemperance, such as high wages’; the best goods were made when subsistence was most difficult and the workers were ‘obliged to work more and debauch less’. William Hutton, a framework knitter himself before he became a writer, businessman and speculator propounded the same view (in 1781): manufactures tended to decay when ‘plenty preponderates’; a man who could support his family with three days’ labour would not work six; most men would perform no more than would produce maintenance. Arthur Young (1741–1820), the agricultural innovator and author of Travels in France (1792): ‘everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious’.
Others of the new men took an opposite view. As early as 1755 Bishop Berkeley was speculating ‘whether the creation of wants be not the likeliest way to produce industry in a people?’ Not long afterwards Adam Smith was to argue that high wages encouraged increased effort as it brought into view new standards of ‘ease and plenty’ and encouraged the worker to ‘exert his strength to the utmost’ in striving to attain them.
The cultural wars were uncoordinated at first. The New Men attacked the prevailing attitudes that, in their view, stood in the way of progress whatever the consequences. If nothing positive resulted, another attack would be launched – there was a vast hinterland that could be laid waste. In our own times the hinterland is less and the need for precision greater. Re-direction, re-structuring, re-education, re-positioning are the watchwords. Although often stronger in intent than in effect, these re-s are less wasteful a way of moulding society than the brute, unbuffered assaults of previous times.
The new person that emerged, or is emerging, from the psychic wars, is examined later (in Chapter 3: Human Nature).
This extract forms the opening paragraphs of the section titled The Great Transition of Chapter 1 Market Society.
Last updated on 13 November 2019