INTELLECTUALS, ELITES AND MERITOCRACY

INTELLECTUALS, ELITES AND MERITOCRACY

An emphasis on sociological continuity in history suggests that the social hierarchy of medieval and early modern Europe was modified, rather than overturned, by industrialization. Many elite groups, including the ‘philosophes’/‘men of letters’ of each national society, were able to renegotiate their position vis-à-vis other groups and to retain many important privileges. (The invention of a new terminology— ‘intellectuals’/‘intelligentsia’ —at the close of our period should not be allowed to disguise this.) The elite status of ‘the professions’ and of specialist writers as ‘experts’ was challenged, but not lost, thanks to the growth of literacy, as this change was a necessary prerequisite of the growth of a mass market in printed literature. At opposite ends of the political spectrum, radically anti-elitist ideas were expounded by anarchists and communists, while an academic theory known as ‘elitism’ or ‘elite theory’ was developed after 1880, most notably in Italy and Germany. However, the latter theory was far from being entirely novel, given that belief in the virtues of aristocracy (whether traditional and/or commercial) was a commonplace of many conservatives throughout the period under consideration.

A plethora of arguments regarding the concept of ‘the intellectual’ that originated in the twentieth century (some liberal and some Marxist in character) has made it difficult to discuss the nineteenth-century category of ‘man’/‘woman of letters’ without

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anachronism. The same accusation can be made against a framework that views such figures as participants in wider debates on nationality, gender and class, but as these ideas are unavoidable within contemporary historiography, it seems necessary and desirable that intellectual history should recognize the importance of these categories.

During the twentieth century, the idea that good education is the only true qualification for the legitimate exercise of political power has become known as the case for ‘meritocracy’. In fact, this word was unknown prior to the 1950s, but for the period 1830–1914 the term ‘clerisy’ was a close match. In the context of imperialism, the argument that a process of ‘educating’ the colonised was the best justification of empire (rather than Realpolitik) could be linked to meritocratic ideas, and usually involved attempts to co-opt non-European elites into European culture, rather than seeking to create an ‘educational democracy’.

In medieval and early modern times, the traditional elities of European society were aristocrats, churchmen and (to a lesser extent) lawyers. In monarchical systems, a core elite’ of courtiers surrounded the monarch—and sometimes royal courts recruited ‘talent’ from outside of the dominant elite families, for example the Tudor statesman, Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485–1540). Republican systems, such as the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, conferred elite status upon a commercial stratum, so it is sometimes possible to speak of a ‘merchant elite’. Although standing armies were far from universal (and were usually replaced by militias in republics), there were numerous examples of ‘military elites’ throughout the pre-industrial epoch. Moreover, this pattern was at least recognizable outside of Europe, although in the case of China, the mandarinate—which administered the whole country on behalf of the Emperor—was an important example of

a bureaucratic elite.

Returning to Europe, and proceeding to the turn of the nineteenth century, it seems that while traditional members of the elite such as courtiers, the nobility (in general), religious leaders and military officers were being challenged for authority by the nouveaux riches of the bourgeoisie, the newly established role of the ‘philosophes’ or ‘men of letters’ was also open to renegotiation. Apart from the fact that many ‘philosophes’, ‘illuminati’ and other educated members of society were themselves nobles, support for the aristocracy had been commonplace, because aristocrats had become the major source of patronage for both individuals and universities as the role of the Church in society declined. In the new century, writers came from a wider variety of social backgrounds and the ‘republic of letters’ became a battleground between different ideologies and world-views.

Although the nineteenth century was a period in which scholarly inquiries tended to become more specialized (partly due to the development of specialist syllabuses in universities) the popularization by intellectuals of relatively esoteric doctrines (e.g. by DARWIN and RENAN) was notable and important. The questioning of traditional Christianity from scientific and historical perspectives had a clear impact on popular attitudes, as well as acting as a catalyst for experiments in existential and liberal theology—for example by KIERKEGAARD and Frederick Temple. Yet, if the nineteenth century was an age where religion was both important and contested, the doctrine of Christian poverty was rarely practised by choice—from this perspective, figures such as BOOKER T.WASHINGTON and GANDHI made a virtue of necessity for their followers. Instead, Europe and North America began to develop the

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characteristics of modern consumer societies and an international community of political economists (e.g. RICARDO, LIST, JEVONS, Francis A.Walker and Leon Walras) charted the parallel development of a’science’ of the production of wealth. As we now know, however, an account of how and why commodities are produced under certain conditions cannot answer the question of whether or not the various ‘players’ in a market- place deserve the rewards they receive.

Meanwhile, the growth of literacy and the spread of education also raised problems of status within ‘the professions’ and amongst writers—although it was these very phenomena that created a much-expanded market for printed matter. BURKE even suggested that the French Revolution of 1789 was due to the machinations of the ‘inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members’ of the legal profession in the National Assembly. In response to this charge, a multi-causal explanation of the Revolution—that it was not caused by a single factor, but by ‘an incessant chain of [oppressive] events’—was expounded by GODWIN. His Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) also proposed a communistic ‘system of equality’, which would ensure that ‘all men were admitted into the field of knowledge’ and ‘all were wise’. Furthermore, while Godwin implied a residual role for ‘geniuses’, during the same decade in France, the ideal of a communist society with no elites whatsoever was put forward by BABEUF. Hence, although Marx and Engels enjoy a unique place in the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Europe, their work drew upon established traditions of revolutionary agitation and radical anti-elitism (see MARX AND MARXISM).

It was probably the relative success of the new revolutionary tradition in Europe before 1870, and its perceived failure to establish a ‘true democracy’ after 1870, which created the preconditions for the rise of analytical and normative elitism as identifiable schools of thought. On one side of the coin, ultra-democratic doctrines continued to enjoy

a measure of support, which provoked moderates and reactionaries to rebut them, and, on the other, the absence of a viable counter-example to the claim that ‘all societies are hierarchies’ encouraged the development of a more general set of elitist concepts. From the 1880s onwards, the Italian scholar, MOSCA, contended that in every society an organized minority (‘the political class’) ruled over the disorganized majority. As the twentieth century began, the political economist, PARETO, argued that this minority was usually divided into a governing elite, who exercised political power directly, and a non- governing elite, who merely enjoyed political influence. In the modern world, this non- governing elite was, in fact, a group of ‘elites’, such as political parties and professional groups, who might aspire to exertise political power themselves. In order to describe circumstances where these aspirations were realized, Pareto coined the phrase ‘the circulation of elites’. The changing role of elites in every part of the world certainly added plausibility to these hypotheses. Italian elite theory was—at one level—a reaction against radical egalitarianism (as noted above), but it was egalitarian in the limited senses that it respected ‘freedom of opportunity’ as a cause of social mobility and treated all members of an elite as more or less significant. In Germany, by contrast, liberal elite theorists (such as WEBER) paid greater attention to the ‘charismatic’ role of individual leaders in political life, while in France the two Bonapartes had encouraged both a ‘cult’ of their own personalities and a ‘nobility of merit’.

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In essence, normative elitism is belief in the virtues of an aristocracy and this normative position retained a number of reputable supporters throughout the period. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, SAINT-SIMON and COMTE advocated government by a strictly organized ‘new elite’ of natural and social scientists (with support from bankers and industrialists), while, in the 1840s, CARLYLE concluded that the energy of the new ‘Captains of Industry’ made them the best available candidates for social leadership, although he still hankered after a place for literature in an ‘aristocracy of talent’. Later, at the fin de siècle, NIETZSCHE despaired of both the new and the traditional European elites, but he outlined a programme for a future generation of artistic individualists (‘the übermensch) who might one day achieve a ‘transvaluation of all values’. Yet, whether organization, energy or insight was the most valued characteristic of small-group leadership, it had to be acquired through education, so there is a ‘natural’ connection between the question of elitism and the ‘self-identity’ of the educated classes of the nineteenth century.

The use of the word ‘intellectual’ as a noun seems to have begun in seventeenth- century England, but the term was originally synonymous with ‘thinking being’. In the early nineteenth century, the noun acquired currency as a term for a programmatic politician, but it was only in the 1840s that the plural acquired its portmanteau quality as

a description of writers, scientists and artists in general. Nevertheless, Heyck (1998) has shown that such usage was very rare and did not indicate ‘a prevailing way of thinking about cultural activities’. The popularity of the term in Continental Europe dates from the Dreyfus Affair, and the famous ‘Manifeste des intellectuels’ published by Emile Zola and his supporters in January 1898. Four notable schools of interpretation have dominated discussions about intellectuals since that time, each of them defined by a particular view, namely: the view that intellectuals ‘speak’ for the ruling class, the view that intellectuals ‘speak’ for society as a whole, the view that intellectuals should ‘speak’ for those who cannot ‘speak’ for themselves and the view that intellectuals should withdraw from public affairs and simply pursue ‘truth’. Each of these will now be examined briefly.

During the early twentieth century, LENIN adapted Marxist theory in order to endow the concept of ‘ideology’ with greater explanatory power and the Russian term ‘intelligentsia’ acquired popularity. While Marx and Engels had written in 1840s that the ‘prevailing ideas of a period have always been simply the ideas of the ruling class’, it subsequently became commonplace for Marxists to explain the content, as well as the orientation, of intellectual life with reference to the capitalist economic system. Nikolai Bukharin’s Historical Materialism (1921) argued that the intelligentsia (viewed as ‘ideological labourers’) developed norms that were always conducive to the preservation of capitalist society. Consequently, intellectuals enjoyed a ‘monopoly of knowledge’ which ensured that they enjoyed ‘a greater share of the social product than their sub- ordinates’. Connections between the ‘ruling class’ and ‘the intellectuals’ in the nineteenth century were certainly commonplace, but they were also more complicated than most Marxists have allowed.

Nineteenth-century theories of history that accorded primacy to the production of knowledge (e.g. the theories of Hegel (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM) and COMTE) were the precursors of twentieth-century theories of society that accorded privilege to the producers of knowledge—for example the theories of Karl Mannheim (1893–1947). According to Mannheim, the ‘free intelligentsia’ of the modern period were

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the direct successors of the medieval clergy (a view he shared with COLERIDGE) and they enjoyed special responsibility for moulding ‘society’s world-view’. The same assumption of the potency of abstract theorizing was reflected in Julien Benda’s negative assessment of ‘the values of action’ (which the European intelligentsia were alleged to have espoused in the period between 1890 and 1927) but the ideal of Socratic independence expressed in La Trahison des clercs (1927) can be found much earlier; in JOHN STUART MILL, for example. Events such as the Governor Eyre Controversy and the Dreyfus Affair drew attention to the claim that writers, scientists and artists had a special duty to espouse causes that were unpopular with both ‘the political class’ and society at large. Here, intellectuals were resisting, rather than moulding, the ‘spirit of the age’. As for the ideal of complete separation from politics, it is certainly worth noting that Gustave Flaubert advocated ‘Art for the Sake of Art’ from the 1850s to the 1870s and that EMERSON had urged his fellow scholars to ‘leave governments to clerks and desks’ in his lecture on The American Scholar as early as 1837.

To risk stating the obvious, nineteenth-century men (and women) of letters did not define themselves with reference to Soviet or Mannheimian definitions of ‘the intellectual’. The French Revolution inspired some (but not all) to set aside apparently disinterested pursuit of knowledge for political partisanship and to create a new category, the revolutionary agitator. Within more traditional political discourse, Plato’s ideal of the ‘philosopher-king’ still had appeal for some, while others aspired to the more ‘realistic’ role of advisers to their political masters. Slightly more technical questions with a wide- ranging significance were ‘Could humanity’s ever-widening knowledge be integrated into a single system?’ and (but with very different implications) ‘Should the multiplication of disciplines be accepted and even welcomed?’ The answers that intellectuals gave to these questions were sometimes explicit, and sometimes the answers must be inferred from their practice by the historians of today. The central preoccupations of the nineteenth century—at least in Europe—appear to have been wealth, power and spirituality, with class, gender, race and nationality also enjoying strong claims for attention by the intellectual historian. While the practice of ‘gendered readings’ of apparently ‘gender-free’ texts has become commonplace since the 1960s, it can be argued that even quite ‘technical’ literature should be read with reference to nationality. It was often through the deployment of concepts of ‘national character’ that judgements regarding the appropriate distribution of political power were surreptitiously introduced into ‘non-political’ discourse.

There were, of course, many explicitly nationalist and proto-nationalist movements in the period 1789 to 1914 and—since the 1960s—the Czech historian, Miroslav Hroch, has argued that many of these movements emerged according to a definite sequence. Hroch contends that in the early stage of a nationalist movement (‘Phase A’), scholarship—as practised amongst a social elite—values the culture, language and history of an ethnic group, but it is not evangelical regarding the centrality of this value. In the next stage (‘Phase B’), new activists join in the intellectual movement and make use of its proto- nationalist scholarship as a resource for agitations designed to spread ‘national consciousness’ throughout their ethnic community. Where such an agitation is successful,

a consensus emerges that national identity is especially valuable. This is expressed through a mass movement (‘Phase C’). The ‘Hroch sequence’ is a useful explanatory

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device, but more contingent factors, such as diplomatic strategies, also played an important role in the political history of the nineteenth century.

This is not to deny that frequently nationalistic ideologies were closely associated with processes of state-building, but where an already well-established political entity existed, other questions—such as the ‘ruler/adviser’ question—were more prominent. Plato’s ideal of the ‘philosopher-king’ concept may not have been directly applicable to Europe in the nineteenth century, but intellectual expertise was co-opted into the highest echelons of government with some regularity. Gladstone, DISRAELI and Henry Fawcett enjoyed significant reputations as novelist, Classical scholar and political economist respectively—and all were chosen as British ministers. Yet John Stuart Mill, an archetypal Victorian polymath, only served a short period as an MP (1865–8). In contrast, the French historian, GUIZOT, served as both a minister of education (1832–7) and a foreign minister (1840–7), although his short-lived premiership (1847–8) ended in the famous February Revolution. An intellectual could become a politician, but by no means every politician was an intellectual.

Outside the political ‘establishment’, the leadership of various socialist and nationalist societies often fell into the hands of privileged, educated, but disaffected, persons and the model of the revolutionary secret society was ‘exported’ to Asia—where it meshed with already existing traditions of revolutionary conspiracy. Nevertheless, self-taught working men (‘autodidacts’) such as Josef Dietzgen and PROUDHON could make a significant contribution to the philosophical and political culture of the time through their own efforts. Furthermore, the desire to be a political figure was by no means universal and so it must be asked whether the absence of a formal education was an insurmountable obstacle to more modest forms of social promotion. Clearly from an empirical perspective, the answer varied greatly from country to country and continent to continent, but the assumption that such promotion was possible was very commonly held—and helps to explain the international popularity of a work such as Self Help (1859) by Smiles.

One of the most notable prejudices of the period, shared by most men and by a significant number of women too, was that mental labour was generally unsuitable for the female sex. The logical consequence of this was that many held that a woman could not

be an intellectual . However, at the very beginning of our period, a challenge to this viewpoint was certainly implicit in the activities of (Germaine) DE STAËL, who worked with Tracy to establish a short-lived role for the ‘idéologistes’ in post-Jacobin France. Of course, de Staël’s aristocratic background insulated her from most of the pressures of family life and domestic labour that—alongside the formal restrictions of the law and the academy—placed great limitations on the ability of many women to contribute to the intellectual life of the nineteenth century. The career of her less socially privileged contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, illustrates these constraints in microcosm. The subsequent growth of an emancipation movement in Europe and North America, which challenged the ‘masculinity’ of the intelligentsia in the name of equal citizenship, is now well known, but, once again, vocabulary changed more slowly. The term ‘feminism’ was not coined as a description of the movement’s theory of gender equality until the 1890s, but, in Britain alone, figures such as Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Jane Harrison, HARRIET MARTINEAU and Mary Somerville made significant contributions to both imaginative literature and scholarship.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 322 Assumptions of racial inequality were other commonplaces of the period, but a few

educated men in North America, South Africa and British India were able to challenge the view that physiological differences between Europeans and non-Europeans predetermined the intellectual inferiority of the latter. The careers of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B.DU BOIS and Mohandas Gandhi had this effect, but they also reflected more general questions regarding intellectual leadership during our period. Washington’s politics relied upon the assumption that existing ‘interests’ could be reconciled by gradual dissemination of more enlightened views; Du Bois’s politics presumed that social science (later Marxism) could provide a conceptual grid within which a challenge by the oppressed to their oppressors would lead to a social transformation through which new (more harmonious) interests would arise; while Gandhi’s doctrines of non-violent resistance and peasant self-sufficiency offered a half- way house between accommodation and revolution. Moreover, Gandhi’s Tolstoyan politics involved no claim that education should be specially rewarded; in this too he was outside of the nineteenth-century mainstream.

The term ‘intellectual’ existed throughout the nineteenth century, but—as was noted— it only acquired its modern resonances at the close of the period. In contrast, the word ‘meritocracy’ was not coined until the late 1950s to describe government by people selected on merit through a competitive education system. The term first appeared in The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033 (1958)—a dystopian ‘history of the future’ in the style of WELLS or Orwell—by the sociologist Michael Young (1915–2002): this was a work composed principally as a satirical critique of educational segregation in mid- twentieth-century Britain. However, the word ‘meritocracy’ has acquired a secondary meaning in the last 40 years, as a term for any ruling or influential class of educated people. This usage is much closer to the nineteenth-century concept of ‘clerisy’, although the terms are not exactly synonymous because a great deal of European speculation from the earlier period had religious connotations and assumed that it was more important to develop the ‘higher faculties’ of those who already enjoyed power and influence, rather than to recruit ‘new blood’ through formal education.

Of course, meritocratic thinking in the nineteenth century was far from homogenous. For example, the claim by an educated class to legitimate power and influence was sometimes justified on the basis of an alleged ability to stabilize society, and sometimes on the basis of an alleged ability to radically change and improve social affairs. For those Europeans and Americans who emphasized the importance of social stability, higher learning might be best deployed to reconcile the material interests of others, to defend orthodox religion or to debunk the theories of those intellectuals who took a revolutionary path.

In Imperial China, on the other hand, the dominant Confucian ideology was not perceived to be under threat. Its supporters continued to stress the importance of recruiting talented individuals to bolster, rather than reform, the mandarinate—although Weber argued that, in practice, corruption ensured that social mobility was much more limited than in liberal capitalist America, as did the regulations that excluded women, merchants, entertainers and brothel-keepers (!) from participating in the classical examination system. In Africa, meanwhile, the traditional elites did not enjoy even the limited respect from Europeans that Asian elites received; in particular, religious conversion to Christianity was generally expected as a precondition of education for a

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subordinate, administrative role in the local imperialist structures, while no such strictures were applied to Muslims or Hindu brahmans by the British in India after 1858. In the context of imperialism, the education of the colonized was often presented as a justification for Realpolitik; although this generally involved a strategy of co-opting non- European elites into the norms of European culture, rather than creating an ‘educational democracy’.

During the period under consideration, only Latin America succeeded in emulating the USA by achieving political independence from European colonialism. Despite the originally liberal inspiration of the anti-colonial movement, resistance was led by the ‘Bonapartist’ SIMON BOLIVAR—and the military caudillo became the archetypal South American contribution to the political ecology of the nineteenth century. Across the continent as a whole, a military elite generally held formal power, while a landed elite enjoyed economic privilege; both groups were of European descent, while indigenous peoples remained clearly subordinate and social mobility was minimal. European intellectual disputes were sometimes mirrored in political life—the first Brazilian Republic adopted the Comtean slogan ‘Order and Progress’ as its national motto, Paraguay provided a home for Bernard Förster’s anti-Semitic colony in the 1890s and Otilio Montaño assisted Emiliano Zapata in drafting the ‘Plan of Ayala’ in 1911—but these were exceptional interventions. There were no ‘velvet revolutions’ in the nineteenth century: Bolivar and Bismarck, Zapata and the Paris Commune all made history using ‘blood and iron’. As the Venezuelan author, Simón Rodriguez, observed:

Rare indeed is the military man who can distinguish among men of letters, but rarer still is the literary man who will do justice to a soldier.