Class is to Britain what sex is to teenagers-more talked about than practised. Stein Ringen of Oxford University has argued persuasively that: "What is peculiar to Britain is not the reality of the class system and its continuing existence, but class psychology: the preoccupation with class, the belief in class, and the symbols of class in manners, dress, and language." David Cannadine's book takes that as its starting point. He then identifies three very different models of a class structure which we jumble up with "sociological meldings and taxanomical glissades."
His first model he calls hierarchical, with an infinity of gradations, like a state procession, starting with the grandest and ending with the lowest. This is both a hierarchy of status and of income. Second, what he calls the "triadic" model of upper, middle and lower classes with agricultural wealth marking the upper classes, professional or industrial activity for the middle classes, and then manual workers. (This second model has been favoured by people who see themselves as being in the middle, which somehow becomes the repository of wisdom and prudence.) Then there is a third "polarised" model of "them" and "us," patricians and plebs. This has always appealed to radicals who claim to speak for all except the decadent top 10,000. It reminds us of Gladstone saying that when it comes to "truth, justice and humanity... I will back the masses against the classes," and Thatcherites shocked by the defeatism of the patrician establishment.
Cannadine shows how we can make sense of much social, political and cultural argument in Britain over the centuries by seeing people slipping and sliding between these three different ways of contemplating class. But the real test of his argument is to explain why the British are so preoccupied with class, if we are not an unusually class-divided society. His explanation is that our political and historical stability has bequeathed us a "larger repertoire of surviving vernacular models than most nations for discussing any social inequality" That sounds plausible.
The most intriguing of Cannadine's three ways of talking about class is the first. He calls this "hierarchical," but also thinks that it describes society most individualistically. Paradoxically, this is both the most traditional and the most contemporary model. If you emphasise the hierarchical aspect you can conjure up an almost medieval world picture, like an ancient tableau culminating in a monarch with divine legitimacy. But equally, if you emphasise the individualistic element you get a picture of society as most of us experience it today, an elaborate network of interlinking groups which do not fit into any rigid two-part or three-part class structure and may have little sense of hierarchy. Cannadine seems to favour this model as the most long-lived and persuasive vision of British society, perhaps because it chimes in best with people's actual experiences. But he does not fully explain how it comes about that this model works so well, nor just how hierarchical a model of society it entails.
The best way to resolve these puzzles is to look at the evidence. Cannadine discusses briefly John Major's idea of a classless society, so where better to look than recent research into social change in Huntingdon, John Major's constituency. In one village, out of 140 families, 51 have failed to maintain residence for longer than a generation. In the same village there are 43 cases of property being handed on from generation to generation within the family, as against 98 instances of land being taken up via the open market. The conclusion from the research is clear: most ordinary people in England are "rampant individualists, highly mobile both geographically and socially, market-orientated and acquisitive, ego-centred in kinship and social life." And where is this evidence from? It comes from studies of English society between 1250 and 1450 in Alan MacFarlane's book, The Origins of English Individualism, which shows that even in the Middle Ages Britain was not a traditional peasant society, but an individualistic one in which cash transactions were very important. It is not that Britain had the industrial revolution and then became a capitalist society. It is because we were already the first capitalist society that we were then ripe for the industrial revolution. Britain has rightly been described as enjoying capitalism without factories for many centuries before industrialisation. This may indeed be a clue to the historic character of British capitalism.
The truth is that Britain has been an exceptionally individualistic and mobile society for generations. Just about every position of social prestige could be bought. As one observer put it: "As for gentlemen, they may be bought cheap in England. For whosoever studies the laws of the realm, who studies in the universities, who professes liberal sciences, and to be short, who can live idly and without manual labour, and will bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman, he should be called master." Thus Sir Thomas Smith, our ambassador to France, trying to explain us to the French in 1565.
Two centuries later it was something which struck de Tocqueville about English society: "I have always been astonished that a fact which distinguished England from more modern nations... has not attracted still more than it has done the attention of philosophers and statesmen." The fact was: "The nobles and the middle classes in England followed together the same courses of business, entered the same professions, and... more significant, inter-married." It is this very mobility which explains the preoccupation with the niceties of social distinction.
Social mobility is often discussed in terms of what mobility takes us from-communitarians, for example, lament what they see as the fracturing of traditional communities as people move out and move up. But we should not merely think of where people are moving from, but where they are moving to. There is strong evidence that people move to form new groups with others very like themselves. Michael Porter has taught us the importance of clustering; how in a mobile economy, firms are not evenly distributed but, instead, particular industries cluster together in very tight spaces. The same seems to apply to society as a whole. Mobile individuals end up clustering together too. One of the best books on the social structure of America, probably the world's most mobile society, is Michael Weiss's The Clustering of America. It shows how extraordinarily homogeneous communities have arisen in America precisely as a result of its mobility. Highly mobile societies can be very diverse at the macro level but very homogeneous at the micro level.
Britain has been a mobile society for much longer than continental Europe. What follows from that is not the absence of social distinction but, instead, a particularly finely-graded and nuanced set of patterns of living in which even the street that you live in tells a social story. It is a society well-attuned to fine-mesh distinctions which are lost in the crude two-part or three-part division of society. You may have mixed views about these subtle distinctions but they are not evidence of social immobility. Indeed, it could be the opposite.
How much does this argument help us to understand contemporary Britain? Take two facts about modern British society. Every year The Sunday Times publishes a list of the 500 richest people in the country. In a recent list, six of those were sons of miners. Another fact: a group of seven-year-old children sit a basic ability test; which is the better predictor of their eventual occupational status-their own performance or the occupational status of their father at the time they sat the test? The National Child Development Study of children born in 1958 shows that the child's performance is a much better predictor than his or her background.
At the same time, we are told that there is a problem of social exclusion. We all know some of those dismal housing estates where a host of appalling social problems feed on each other. How can this happen if we are such a mobile society? Is part of the explanation, perhaps, that it is happening because we are such a mobile society? It may be no accident that some of these problems are at their most intense in mobile Britain and America. If people who can move out do so then for those left behind things can be tough indeed.
The study of class in Britain is rich in such paradoxes. We talk about class in a very traditional way because we have not had the social collapse or the creation of a new polity experienced by most other advanced western countries. We may be unusually sensitive to the nuances of social distinction, but that may be because we can move around within a very elaborate social structure. We prize traditional roles-but just about all of them are open to people who can buy them or, even better, earn them.
Class in Britain
David Cannadine
Yale University Press 1998, ?19.95
