¹ It should be said that Stearns' theory does work, in that it serves to organize and provide an explanation for certain data; my objection is that it does this clumsily. Some years ago Nisbet, Robert, “The Decline and Fall of Social Class,” Pacific Sociological Review, 2 (Spring 1959), 12, rejected what he identified as modern class theory on just these grounds: “A historian of ideas… tells me that from his point of view the doctrine of social class would seem to have about the same relation to the data of stratification that the Ptolemaic view once had to celestial phenomena. I judge from my colleague's words that by the end of the fifteenth century the Ptolemaic doctrine was not so much wrong as it was tortuous, inefficient, and clumsy…”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² In an interesting discussion of current thinking about government on the local level in America, David C. Hammack suggests that “The most promising hypothesis … is that power has become increasingly dispersed as American communities have become larger, as their economies have become more specialized and more dependent on expertise and coordination, and as their populations have become more diverse.” “Problems in the Historical Study of Power in the Cities and Towns of the United States, 1800–1960,” American Historical Review, 83 (04 1978), 341.Google Scholar

³ The political insignificance of the French nobility has not always been immediately apparent because many remained active in political life. See Pouthas, Ch.-H., “Les ministres de Louis-Philippe,” Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, I (04–06 1954), 102–30.Google ScholarHigonnet, Patrick L.-R. and Higonnet, Trevor B., “Class, Corruption, and Politics in the French Chamber of Deputies, 1846–1848,” French Historical Studies, V (Fall 1967), 204–24,CrossRefGoogle Scholar argue that the large number of aristocrats, more than a third of the total number of deputies, shows how questionable the designation of “bourgeois monarch” was. Yet they point out that aristocrats and commoners were not separated by any significant differences in occupation, income, or political program, and that ancien regime aristocrats were not to be found in positions of importance, which would seem to lead to the conclusion that the aristocracy were merging with the Orleanist notables. David Pinkney has long maintained that the Napoleonic nobility and officials were the real victors in 1830: see his The French Revolution of 1830 (Princeton, 1972).Google ScholarBeck, Thomas D., French Legislators, 1800–1834: A Study in Quantitative History (Berkeley, Cal., 1974)Google Scholar argues that 1830 brought a real change in political personnel, with new men more representative of nineteenth-century society, many of whom had been too young to serve Napoleon.

⁴ Giddens', Anthony impressive analysis, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (New York, 1973), pp. 118 ff.,Google Scholar points out that Marx paid little attention to the nature of the connections between economic and political power, and himself attempts to clarify the distinctions among “ruling class,” “governing class,” “power elite,” and “leadership groups,” in relation to effective power. His typologies have considerable relevance in contrasting democratic with “feudal” society. It might be noted that Giddens' general analysis supports a three-class model, though one different from that of Stearns.

⁵ Moore, D. C., “Concession or Cure: The Sociological Premises of the First Reform Act,” The Historical Journal, IX: 1 (1966), 39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ Moore, D. C., “The Other Face of Reform,” Victorian Studies, V (09 1961), 8.Google Scholar

⁷ Moore, D. C., “Concession or Cure,” p. 43.Google Scholar

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid., p. 58.

¹⁰ Moore, D. C., “Other Face of Reform,” p. 31.Google Scholar

¹¹ Bagehot, Walter, Bagehot's Historical Essays, John-Stevas, Norman St., ed. (Garden City, N.Y., 1965), p. 148.Google Scholar

¹² Moore, D. C., “Other Face of Reform,” passim.Google Scholar

¹³ Clark, George Kitson, An Expanding Society: Britain 1830–1900 (London and Melbourne, 1967), p. 25,Google Scholar sharply limits the importance of 1832: “It was the technique of making v obvious concessions, of granting liberal and humane reforms, while the old ruling classes kept the essentials of power under their hand.” He locates the aristocracy's loss of power in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when the government abandoned them in the agricultural crisis. The obvious heir was the urban middle class. Yet Kitson Clark must concede that “Indeed they already had a good deal of power in the country… They already had not a little political influence,” pp. 38–39. Is it unreasonable to ask how they had achieved this with the “essentials of power” firmly in the hands of the old ruling class? Cowling, Maurice, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution. The Passing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1967),CrossRefGoogle Scholar shows much the same kind of reasoning. Cowling seems to suggest that because men like Lord John Russell did not capitulate completely to the demands of the extreme reformers and destroy the aristocratic regime, we are to believe that the 1867 legislation amounted to very little in the way of change. This historical approach in English historiography probably owes a considerable amount to the important work of the late Alfred Cobban. A similar desire to avoid revolutionary stereotypes led Cobban to minimize the extent of change brought about in France by the Revolution.

¹⁴ Perkin, Harold, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880 (London and Toronto, 1969). Perkin modifies the three-class model by recognizing a professional middle class as “a class, sub-class, or socio-economic group whose members had enough in common to support a separate social ideal which had a profound effect upon the rest of society”, p. 253.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 271–72.

¹⁶ It is mistaken to assume influence where there may be only similar responses to the same basic conditions, e.g., Thomas Laquer suggests that the high degree of discipline imposed in worker-run Sunday Schools may have had less to do with the influence of the factory model or of middle-class morality than with the need to achieve some order among a large group of young children. Laquer, T. W., Religion and Respectability: Schools and Working Class Culture 1780–1850 (New Haven, Conn., 1976).Google Scholar Involved in all such explanations of influence are questions of motivation, and arguments about the “ruling class” often interpret motivation narrowly. The recognition that a group were self-serving should not preclude acknowledgement that their motives were mixed, with altruism quite possibly present. There is also the likelihood of a rational adjustment to the demands of a situation. Every society, for example, must socialize its young, always at some cost to the child. Upper-class boys at the English public schools seem in many respects to have been subjected to a more brutal discipline than were the poor in their schools. There is also something questionable about inferring motive and purpose from what appears to be function. Thus Richard Johnson in an interesting article, “Educational Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian England,” Past and Present, No. 49 (November 1970), 96–119, argues that the function of the school system in early Victorian England was to train the poor in ways that would not threaten upper-class dominance: “…control was the essence of the phenomenon…” (p. 119). Johnson certainly shows that social control was important, but I am not so sure that he demonstrates that it was the chief motive.Google Scholar

¹⁷ West, E. G., Education and the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1975).Google Scholar West's case deserves serious attention, though his use of statistics has been questioned: see the review by Ray, Douglas, History of Education Quarterly, 17 (Winter 1977), 481–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Tilly, Charles, “Population and Pedagogy in France,” History of Education Quarterly, 13 (Summer 1973), 113–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Perkin, H., Origins, pp. 410ff. Perkin's first five chapters on economic developments are also excellent.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Zeldin, Theodore, France 1848–1945 (2 vols., Oxford, 1973–1977), I, 19, discussing the ambiguous notion of la France bourgeoise, observes that other classes shared at least some of the same values, and concludes that the bourgeoisie “consciously or unconsciously represented the common denominator of the ambitions of their time. The phrase la France bourgeoise was thus a tautology in that to be a bourgeois meant to subscribe to the most general national aspirations.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁰ The Historical Journal, XVI (No. 1, 1973), 200–201. The concluding quotation is reported by Viscount Haldane.Google Scholar

²¹ The classic expression of this is Heinrich Mann's brilliant novel, Der Untertan, which was completed at the outbreak of war in 1914 but not published till the war was over. Note the remarks of the Free Conservative spokesman, Frhr. v. Zedlitz und Neukirch, Verhandlungen desPreussischenHausdes Abgeordneten, 31 January 1912: “ … unser Staalswesen durchdringt ein Zug nach Parade und Theatralik…” Also Wächter, Emil, Die Prestigegedanke in der deutschen Politik von 1890 bis 1914, Berner Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Geschichte, II (Aarau, 1941).Google ScholarVietsch, Eberhard v., Bethmannn Hollweg: Slaatsmann Zwischen Macht und Ethos (Boppard am Rhein, 1969), p. 173, reports Tirpitz's story of Bethmann's astonished reply to the complaint that he was not formulating great goals for the German people: “Was den für ein Ziel?”Google Scholar

²² Mommsen, W. J., “Domestic Factors in German Foreign Policy before 1914,” Central European History, VI (03 1973), 27. “ I t was only this situation which enabled the semi-authoritarian government of Bethmann Hollweg to carry on in spite of its unpopularity in all political quarters. To put it another way, the stalemate of the party system was the main source of Bethmann Hollweg's relative strength.”Google Scholar

²³ Weber, Max, “Parlament u. Regierung,” Gesammelte politische Schriften (Munich, 1921), pp. 157–66.Google Scholar Also Brentano, Lujo, Mein Leben im Kaempfe urn die soziale Entwicklung Deutschlands (Jena, 1931), p. 282;Google ScholarRathenau, Walther, “Parlamentarismus,” 1913, Gesammelte Schriften (5 vols.; Berlin, 1918), I, 235–9.Google Scholar

²⁴ Zeldin, T., France, I, 13.Google Scholar

²⁵ Zeldin, Theodore, “Social History and Total History,” Journal of Social History, 10 (Winter 1976), 243–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Neale, R. S., “Class and Class-Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century England: Three Classes or Five?” Victorian Studies, XII (09 1968), 5–32.Google Scholar

²⁷ The “ruling class' is still a useful description when used to describe a particular kind of carefully circumscribed group concerned with government. One of the difficulties in class analysis, as indicated in footnote 4, has been that the term has been used without careful differentiation for two different types of groups. In the sense used by Marx, Perkin, and Stearns the word applies to a large group in control of wealth, politics, and culture, and capable of a high degree of unity in times of crisis when its members act as a conflict group to defend their interests. The expression has been used by others to refer to a relatively small group of those actively engaged in the exercise of political power; this is the sense in which it often appears in the work of those English and German historians mentioned earlier. The personnel of these two ‘ruling classes’ cannot be viewed as identical; many rich business men played no direct political role, many officials were comparatively poor.

The ruling class, in the second sense, can be defined with some precision. It was composed chiefly of members of representative assemblies elected repeatedly, professional government officials, and leaders of business and landed organizations actively engaged in politics. These men were drawn from landed and business families, not necessarily the most wealthy. In England there was no marked division, as there was in Germany, between party leaders and ministers; men like Liverpool and Wellington, Peel and Gladstone, were both party leaders and professional government men. This class must be seen as both an elite and a profession. (I should make clear that I am not here following A. Giddens' typology.)

A significant proportion of this ruling class did not express the interests of their class of origin in any simple way, since their orientation was also that of professional government officials, with obligations to the larger community or at least to the stability of government. They had always some slight measure of independence against organized interests. In fact, with universal suffrage and the proliferation of economic interest groups, it is hard to see how there could have been orderly government at all without some group at the center to act as mediator. The fact that in Germany officials were increasingly harried and their area of maneuver more and more limited, ultimately to vanish altogether during World War I, was a symptom of the breakdown of government.

Interesting work is being done on the nature of professionalization, suggesting relatively unexplored ways to approach questions of social structure. See Noel, and Parry, Jose, The Rise of the Medical Profession: A Study of Collective Social Mobility (London, 1976). The Parrys acknowledge their debt to A. Giddens. To me it appears that the profession of government official has been curiously neglected. His unmediated access to government gives him a power different in kind from that of the other professions (whose power is also real and often great). Marxists tend to dismiss this group as an adjunct of the ruling class, but the statement, obviously true in part, is scarcely exhaustive.Google Scholar