De Tocqueville Ancien Régime: last word

Over the two centuries before 1789 political life was abolished; no way remained in which the ordinary people of France could participate in public affairs. As for the aristocracy, they retained their privileges (exemption from tax), lost much of their wealth and practically all of their power. Power was sucked entirely into the state: i.e. the king, operating a bureaucracy so centralised and all-pervasive that De T calls it ‘in effect socialist’ (not a good word in his vocabulary); the state we associate with modern France (and later the Soviet Union) was in fact completely in place before the revolution; only the class structure changed.

So: a population with no political or civic experience within the memory of several generations, and no political debate or discourse except the highly abstract, rarified, reason-driven disquisitions of the politically naive, inexperience and irresponsible philosophes with their all-or-nothing, everything-by-reason, clean-slate, rebuild-human-nature ideas -- which one way and another got through to the rural and urban poor and, in the absence of the moral inhibition and sense of proportion that come with living in communities that regulate themselves, licensed the ruthless implementation of abstract schemes in the revolution and, during the Terror, the unrestrained indulgence of the most savage impulses.

What was established thereby, De T says, was a new régime in which equality was the watchword -- equality as subjects of the state -- and liberty featured not at all, having been ignored as by all the 18th century treatises (the philosophes had only contempt for the idea of popular participation in government). And we ended up with the revival in a new guise of the absolutist state, equally unchallengeable and equally oppressive.

Discuss.

Election debates

It seems to me that television in some ways does less well for us on politics than than it used to. The parties have agreed to a televised debate between the leaders before the General Election, and the consensus is that it will an over-prepared and over-controlled affair from which we’ll learn little that’s new and which will bore us.

But I remember that there regularly (was it monthly?) used to be a programme, perhaps on Sunday evening, called (I think) Meet the Press. Harold Wilson, I recall, was grilled for a decent length of time -- it couldn’t have been an hour, could it? -- by three or four senior journalists. I think I remember Callaghan, too, and perhaps Barbara Castle, and it was really interesting.

Certainly there’s still good interviewing on tv, certainly on Channel Four News and BBC Newsight, but the dynamic with a panel of interviewers makes for quite a different sort of event.

So Messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg (you’ve kept quiet about it but don’t pretend you don’t read my blog), look into Meet the Press, please, and bring it back.

Honourable MPs

This from Trollope last night:

‘Dear George, let me have the honour and glory of marrying a man who has gained a seat in the Parliament of Great Britain! Of all positions which a man may attain that, to me, is the grandest.’

Innocent times.

Politics

In this politically depressing time, oddly, I'm feeling more politically optimistic than for a long time. Or part of me is. (I'm not going so far as to say politically active.)

Some particular things have helped. The New Statesman has become authoritative -- it now has some of the key players writing in it. In recent issues we’ve had Danny Blanchflower, the dissident Monetary Policy Committee member who alone turned out to have got it right about the coming receession, and the late G.A. Cohen -- a posthumous contribution on the appeal and the difficulty of socialism. (Jon Cruddas quoted him in a lecture the other day -- see below.)

I read Cohen’s obituary, too, and that sent me to read the less technical parts of one of his books in which he argues that, yes, what seemed to many the first serious and principled stab at a non-capitalist (Marxist) society, the USSR, turned out not to have been that, but that didn’t mean there was no point any longer in looking for alternatives to capitalism as ways of organising economy and society; he refused to draw the lesson of despair from that collapse. I immediately felt he was right.

I heard Jon Cruddas (left-wing Labour MP, possible leadership contender) who was intelligent, sane and well-read; as well as a list of good policies, he urged optimism and spirit: a better society is worth fighting for, the economy can be under human control, what the Tories have in store (see what the local councils they praise are doing) are worth resisting.

Both he and Will Hutton in a recent Observer lament the woeful ignorance of the public and the lamentable job the media do in informing us. Nick Cohen this morning writes about Stieg Larsson, a popular Swedish thriller writer, who came from a near-extinct European left-wing tradition that was both feminist and anti-racist -- reminding me once again, as Cruddas did, and as the late Harold Rosen did when John Hardcastle and I interviewed him, of the quality of political debate and organisation there used to be, in Britain as well as in Europe.

Hutton points out that media commentators as well as the rest of us seem almost universally ignorant that Alistair Darling has already announced in his April budget the measures to cut the deficit that they’re calling for him to announce.

The desire popped into my mind to have everyone who makes an ignorant political or economic remark taken into a room and made to understand (a) how ignorant he or she is and (b) the facts and arguments. Or imagine everything stopping and the whole population getting itself into small groups in houses, pubs, meeting halls, to try to get an understand. I think of those revolutions in which people talk non-stop and rush to read wall newspapers and pamphlets.

But then I realise that I'm one of the ignorant myself. I didn’t know, either, that those measures had been in the works since April. I had read neither the Budget nor the background papers.

By way of politics all I read is one newspaper and the New Statesman. I'd be much better informed if I read the online commentary and blogs attached to the newspapers -- but feel life’s too short. The paper is for mealtimes and knackered times, and if I'm at the computer I'm being productive, not receptive; and I spend enough time at the computer working for me not to welcome the idea of spending more time reading news and comment.

But -- I think is part of what’s new -- I now think I should do more to keep myself informed. 50-60 years ago and even more recently it was taken for granted by some of my teachers and then by some of my teacher colleagues that it was our duty as citizens to be informed and that ignorance was a shame to us. To refer now to that moral imperative would mainly produce a reaction of incomprehension or pity. Nor would I have been much more responsive myself over the last 30 years: I never liked doing the political stuff, Labour Party meetings were tedious, pressure groups and demos were dominated by people I disliked and despised and it wasn’t as if I had nothing to do with my time. Apart from anything else, I was an academic who pursued issues he found absorbing with some commitment and energy. If there was a moral argument about the informed citizen, I suppose I simply chose not to let it bother me.

Well, that isn’t good enough. Just as we should conserve energy and resources even though our own contribution is insignificant if we’re to feel ok with ourselves, so perhaps we have to live politically as if already in a better society. My being well-informed will make negligible difference but in the better society that’s worth hoping for people will act as if the decisions of government are in part their responsibility. Having people around who act as if the revolution (hopefully a gentle one) has already happened may help people to visualise a different possible future.

When teaching in schools, incidentally, I think I always saw my classroom as attempting a small-scale realisation of a good society. That being the priority, mixed-ability teaching was a given. The good that streamed/tracked teaching could bring about for some students (rarely, in my experience, those not in the top classes) had to be foregone as only a secondary gain.