The history of a society can be considered in many aspects. It can be seen in terms of the rise of democracy, the fall of aristocracy, the advance of technology, the recession of religion. It can be conceived, as Tocqueville conceived it, as the work of equality; as Acton considered it, as the work of freedom; or, in Bertrand Russell's terms, as the story of power. There is no limit to the ways of profitably regarding the history of any given society. Each mode of consideration is, as Whitehead has reminded us, “a sort of searchlight elucidating some of the facts, and retreating the remainder into an omitted background.”1
History, the late F. J. Teggart insisted, is plural. It is plural in sequence of event and plural in result. There is no one general statement that can remain meaningful before the diversity of historical materials. For a long time the idea of progress was held capable of assimilating and making intelligible the diverse experiences of man's past. Today it is no longer so held. If there is any single general idea that has replaced it, it is the idea of decline. But the idea of decline is no more, no less, correct than the idea of progress. History is neither progress nor decline alone. It is both. What is determinative in the historian's judgment is simply that aspect of the present he chooses to illuminate.
Thus, if we value the emergence of the individual from ancient confinements of patriarchal kinship, class, guild, and village community, the outcome of modern European history must appear progressive in large degree. For, plainly, the major toll of modern social change has been exacted from such communal entities as these. From the point of view of the individual—the autonomous, rational individual—the whole sequence of events embodied in Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution must appear as the work of progressive liberation. There is nothing wrong with this appraisal of history. It is undeniably illuminative. But it is inescapably selective.
If, on the other hand, we value coherent moral belief, clear social status, cultural roots, and a strong sense of interdependence with others, the same major events and changes of modern history can be placed in a somewhat different light. The processes that have led to the release of the individual from old customs and solidarities have led also to a loss of moral certainties, a confusion of cultural meanings, and a disruption of established social contexts. We cannot, in sum, deal with the progressive emancipation of individuals without recognizing also the decline of those structures from which the individual has been emancipated. Judgments of progress must always be specific and selective; they cannot be disengaged from opposing judgments of decline and disruption.
A preference for the emancipation of the individual and for the advancement of secularism, mobility, and moral freedom may well be sovereign in our total moral appraisal. We may regard these developments in modern history as worth whatever has been exacted from moral certainty and social interdependence. But such preference, understandable though it be, is no warrant for omitting from consideration the historical facts of decline and disintegration. No approach to history and—to the problems of the present is valid that does not regard the present as the outcome, in varying proportions, of both advancement and decline.
Two
If we are to understand the conditions that lie behind the quest for community in our society, we must look not merely to contemporary social and psychological dislocations but to the historical sequences of change which have led up to them. There is a quickly reached limit to the value of diagnoses that dispense with the historical record and that seek, like those of the anthropologist, to explain the present solely in terms of present processes. The historical past has a persistent and penetrating influence upon the behavior and ideas of any generation. Perhaps the greatest contribution of Marx to nineteenth-century economics and psychology was his insistence that all economic and psychic relationships are historically determined. If we would diagnose our own age we had better do so historically, for history is the essence of human culture and thought.
The dislocations and tensions of our own age can be clarified only by reference to certain massive changes that have taken place in modern history in the larger contexts of human association. These are changes in allegiance to institutions, in the location of social functions, in the relationship of men and the norms of culture, and, above all, in the source and diffusion of political power. The present problem of intermediate association in State, industry, and community has its roots in certain conflicts of authority and function that have been notable aspects of the social history of modern Europe.
The historical changes to which I refer have been remarked variously. In the nineteenth century the English conservative, Sir Henry Maine, on the basis of studies in comparative law, was led to see in modern history a continuous movement away from the centrality of the social group, with its attributes of status and membership, to the primacy of the legally autonomous individual and impersonal relations of contract. “Throughout all its course [the movement of progressive societies] has been distinguished by the gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of individual obligation in its place. The Individual is steadily substituted for the Family as the unit of which civil laws take account.”2
Karl Marx was also struck by this drift of social relationships, and, characteristically, he attributed it to the revolutionary influence of the bourgeoisie. “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment. ‘It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy waters of egotistical calculation…. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”3
Similarly, some of the German sociologists of the late nineteenth century called attention to the processes of modern history that have led to an atomization or mechanization of the primary social relationships. Tonnies expressed this as a continuous weakening of the ties of Gemein schaft— the communal ties of family, guild, and village—and a constant maximization in modern times of the more impersonal, atomistic, and mechanical relationships of what he called Gesellschaft.4 Simmel, following insights of Marx and Engels, dealt extensively with the depersonalizing influence upon traditional moral and social patterns of the modern spread of money as a dominant means of exchange. Because of the easy convertibility of all qualitative values and status relationships into fluid relationships of contract, based upon money, modern capitalism has had a leveling and fragmenting effect upon the contexts of status and membership.5 In some what the same way, the great Max Weber pointed out the incidence of powerful processes of rationalization and bureaucratization upon systems of authority, patterns of culture, and the location of social function. These processes have led, Weber declared, to a supremacy in modern times of the impersonal office and of mechanical systems of administration within which the primary unities of social life have become indistinct and tenuous.6
The French sociologists Le Play and Durkheim, in their monumental studies of society, were also led to point out the atomizing effects upon society of such forces as technology, individualism, and the division of labor. “What is in fact characteristic of our development,” wrote Durkheim, “is that it has successively destroyed all the established social contexts; one after another they have been banished either by the slow usury of time or by violent revolution, and in such fashion that nothing has been developed to replace them.”7
So too have such scholars as von Gierke, Duguit, Maitland, Tawney, the Hammonds, and many others called attention to the contrast that exists between contemporary society, organized increasingly in impersonal terms and resting on the legally separate individual, and an earlier form of society characterized by the primacy of custom and community. On the basis of this perceived contrast innumerable specific studies of law, education, kinship, town, and religion have rested.
So far as Western society is concerned, the frame of reference for all of these contrasts is the transition from medieval to modern Europe. It is the social structure of the Middle Ages, real or imagined, that has provided a common point of departure for interpretations as different as those of the socialist Marx and the conservative Maine. It must be our point of departure also.
“Modern history,” declared Lord Acton, “tells how the last four hundred years have modified the medieval conditions of life and thought.” There is wisdom in this generalization. The essence of modern social and cultural history has been the almost incessant preoccupation with principles and structures which are, in substance, medieval. Modern systems of political representation, religious structure, kinship, class, and law cannot be understood except as institutional continuities, modified and readjusted by historical event, arising out of the Middle Ages. And a large number of distinctively modern social movements are made intelligible only when they are seen as responses to economic and intellectual conditions left by the changes or disruptions in medieval institutions and moral certainties.
Three
Amid all the interpretations and judgments of historians regarding medieval society, ranging from the idealizations of a Belloc or Cram to the incisive realism of a Coulton, there is agreement upon certain social characteristics of the Middle Ages, irrespective of the moral inferences to be drawn from them. The first is the preeminence in medieval society—in its economy, religion, and morality—of the small social group. From such organizations as family, guild, village community, and monastery flowed most of the cultural life of the age. The second fact, deriving from the first, is the centrality of personal status, of membership, in society. In the Middle Ages, Jacob Burckhardt has written, “Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category.”8 The reality of the separate, autonomous individual was as indistinct as that of centralized political power. Both were subordinated to the immense range of association that lay intermediate to individual and ruler and that included such groups as the patriarchal family, the guild, the church, feudal class, and the village community. And, as we shall see, the epic of modern European history is composed in very large part of the successive extrications of both individual and State from the fetters of medieval group life.
“All who are included in a community,” wrote Aquinas, “stand in relation to that community as parts to the whole.” The immense influence of the whole philosophy of organism and that of the related doctrine of the great chain of being, which saw every element as an infinitesimal gradation of ascent to God, supported and gave reason for the deeply held philosophy of community. Whether it was the divine Kingdom itself or some component mundane association like the family or guild, the whole weight of medieval learning was placed in support of the reality of social wholes, of communities. To be sure there were sharp challenges to this metaphysical realism, from William of Occam on, and one of the most fascinating aspects of the development of modern philosophy is the succession of metaphysical and epistemological disengagements of the individual and his will from the organismic unities of medieval thought. But, in general, the philosophy of community was dominant in medieval thought.
The centrality of community was much more than a philosophical principle however. Whether we are dealing with the family, the village, or the guild, we are in the presence of systems of authority and allegiance which were widely held to precede the individual in both origin and right. “It was a distinctive trait of medieval doctrine,” Otto von Gierke writes in his great study of medieval groups, “that within every human group it decisively recognized an aboriginal and active right of the group taken as a whole.”9 As many an institutional historian has discovered, medieval economy and law are simply unintelligible if we try to proceed from modern conceptions of individualism and contract. The group was primary; it was the irreducible unit of the social system at large.
The family, patriarchal and corporate in essence, was more than a set of interpersonal relations. It was a fixed institutional system within which innumerable, indispensable functions were performed. Upon it, rather than upon the individual, were levied taxes and fines; to it, rather than the individual, went the honors of achievement. In its corporate solidarity lay the ground of almost all decision affecting the individual—his occupation, welfare, marriage, and the rearing of his children. Property belonged to the family, not the individual, and it could not easily be alienated from the family. Law began with the inviolable rights of the family over its members, and public law, such as it was, could not generally cross the threshold of the family. Beyond the immediate, conjugal family stretched the extended family numbering sometimes hundreds of persons in close association, tightly knit together by custom and function. And beyond the domain of tangible kinship, the immense symbolic influence of the family reached into scores of organizations which adopted the nomenclature and spirit of kinship.
So, too, the prevailing system of agriculture was, as Vinogradoff has emphasized, “communal in its very essence. Every trait that makes it strange and inconvenient from the point of individualistic interests renders it highly appropriate to a state of things ruled by communal conceptions.”10 To be sure there were variations in the intensity of this communality from one area to another, but wherever open-field husbandry was practiced the sheer technical demands of the system, with its complicated network of strips, enjoined upon the peasant a degree of solidarity with his fellows that the later enclosure acts and reform programs found difficult to break. The villager had little alternative, in such surroundings, but to subordinate himself and his desires to those of the village group. And, given the nucleus of households with families in enforced close association, given also the system of communal apportionment of the shares in the arable, the communal decisions about times and places of cultivation, the existence of the all-important commons, and the individual functionaries who served the village as a whole under the watchful eyes of the manorial lord, it is not strange that medieval agriculture should have been pervaded by an ethic of group solidarity, which the agricultural reformers of the eighteenth century found strange to the point of unreason. In the Middle Ages, Maitland has somewhere written, villagers sacrificed efficiency upon the altar of communal equality. “A village formed what we call a community,” Homans has written, “not only because all its members were submitted to the same set of customs—because the land of every villager lay in the form of strips intermingled with those of his neighbors, because every villager followed the same traditional rotation of crops and sent his cattle to run in a common herd. A village formed a community chiefly because all its members were brought up to consent and act together as a group.”11
Even in the towns, where there was a freer air, where there was inevitably a greater amount of individual autonomy, we cannot miss the decisive role of corporate association. What were the towns—at least those which were not survivals of the Roman Empire—but, in origin, associations of merchants and tradesmen. The walls surrounding so many of these towns were no thicker than the protective framework of corporate rights which lay in the charters of the towns. A town was more than a simple place of residence and occupation; it was itself a close association, and its members—citizens, in the medieval sense—were bound to live up to its articles and customs almost as rigorously as the peasants on a manor.12 Within the town were innumerable small associations, the guilds—organizations based first upon occupation, to be sure, but also upon sacred obligations of mutual-aid, religious faith, and political responsibility. Here, too, in these urban social organizations we are dealing with structures of authority and function which long resisted the later efforts of businessmen and political rulers to subjugate or destroy them. And from such studies as those of Rashdall13 we can observe the dominance of the principle of corporate association even in the realm of higher education. The university (a word applied indiscriminately in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to almost any form of fellowship that served a definite function) was basically a guild of masters and students, the prime object of which was the stabilization of learning and the protection of its votaries.
Finally, in the vast empire of religion we see, perhaps at its height, the principle of corporate association with its corollaries of communal obligation and faith mediated by membership in a visible community. It would be absurd to exaggerate either the religious devotion of medieval man or the extent of his associative obligations. It will suffice to say that there were both Pharisees and Protestants in the medieval Church. Yet, we cannot miss the profusion of religious fellowships, frith-guilds, monasteries, and ecclesiastical courts; the emphasis on the communion of saints, on supererogatory works, auricular confession; or the innumerable penetrations of religion into the market place—which seventeenth-and eighteenth-century businessmen were to find so insufferable. In the Middle Ages, allowing for all obliquities and transgressions, the ethic of religion and the ethic of community were one. It was indeed this oneness, so often repressive of individual faith, so often corrupting to the purity of devotion, that the religious reformers like Wyclif, Hus, Calvin, and others were to seek strenuously to dissolve. And so, for quite different reasons, were later political rulers to seek to dissolve this unity. The affinity between extreme religious individualism and allegiance to central national power which Shaw emphasizes in his play St. Joan is an actual historical affinity. Each element was dangerous to the corporate Church. Together, as later events proved, they were irresistible.
Further elaboration upon the centrality of the social group and its attributes of status is unnecessary. Despite the mobility, greater than many earlier historians were wont to realize, reflected in medieval commerce, in the great fairs, in the wanderings of scholars, in the administration of the Church, not to mention the innumerable holy quests, the literature of the age reveals a mentality dominated by matters of allegiance, membership, tradition, and group solidarity. Law and custom were virtually indistinguishable, and both were hardly more than the inner order of associations.
Two points only are in need of stress here. The first is the derivation of group solidarity from the core of the indispensable functions each group performed in the lives of its members. The larger philosophy of community unquestionably had its influence, but the major reason for the profound hold of the family and the local community and guild upon human lives was simply the fact that, apart from membership in these and other groups, life was impossible for the vast majority of human beings. The second point to stress is that the solidarity of each functional group was possible only in an environment of authority where central power was weak and fluctuating. As Ernest Barker has written, the medieval State “abounded in groups and in the practice of what we may call communal self-help because it was not yet itself a fully organized group. When it became such it asserted itself and curtailed the rights of groups with no little vigor.”14 It is indeed this curtailment of group rights by the rising power of the central political government that forms one of the most revolutionary movements of modern history.
Four
Terms of aggregation like the word “medieval” are peculiarly liable, in historical discussion, to arbitrary and distorted usage. As a word, medieval is more commonly made to represent an artificially limited period of time in European history than it is to describe a set of intellectual principles and social institutions which can scarcely be dated at all. Neither the fifteenth nor the sixteenth century ended medieval society if, by medieval, we have reference to types of kinship, property, education, religion, and class. It would be more accurate to see such centuries as a kind of watershed of history, and even then we have to be very careful of the areas and spheres we are referring to. For, measured in institutional terms, large sections of European society remained medieval until well into the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, it is possible to see that by the sixteenth century, many of the communalisms of the Middle Ages had declined sharply. Even earlier, as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there were those who endeavored resolutely to reduce the significance of the whole sphere of association that lay intermediate to the individual and Pope, the individual and emperor, or the individual and king. Such endeavors are to be seen in a great variety of papal edicts, monarchical decrees, and imperial proposals. Making all allowance for the centrality of the social group in medieval life, we should be shortsighted if we missed the often sharp conflicts of principle and practice in the realm of function and authority. Still, it remains true that on the whole these conflicts were absorbed by medieval structures.
It is a different story when we come to the sixteenth century. We are now at the beginning of a world in which the individual—the artist, scientist, the man of business, the politician, and the religious devotee—becomes steadily more detached, in area after area, from the close confinements of kinship, church, and association. This is preeminently the century of the beginnings of secularism, religious dissent, economic individualism, and of political centralization. And in these massive institutional changes we cannot miss the decline of much of the communal-ism that flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
It is necessary, however, to look more closely into this asserted process of decline. Decline, like progress, is a word that frequently obscures the concrete manifestations of change. Because of organismic conceptions of change, it has long been assumed that there is a kind of indwelling tendency toward change in all social institutions and relationships. Because the realities of fixity and persistence are commonly overlooked, under the spell of automatic change, the actual conditions of change are also overlooked. Similarly, it has been assumed that there is a kind of organic continuity and unity of social change which leads necessarily toward a resolution of all conflicts in society to homogeneity and adjustment. To vindicate the principles of continuity and homogeneity has been, in a real sense, the major effort, since Aristotle, of students of social change. Even when, as in recent times, the non-native elements of the idea of Progress have been sharply challenged, the more fundamental conception of the continuity of change has largely been retained.
This assumption has been made the more feasible by the equally widespread conception of institutions as more or less independently structured entities, each capable of being viewed separately, each supposedly endowed with some kind of indwelling tendency toward form and development. The result has been not only to deal with the history of institutions in an essentially unhistorical manner, that is by separating them from determinable historical processes, but, what is equally serious, in an essentially unpsychological manner. The presumed exteriority of institutions to human beings has led to an unreal differentiation between institutions and the concrete purposive strivings of individuals who live in terms of intellectual goals and moral ends. Such institutions as kinship, community, and religion have been dealt with in something of the same manner in which a biologist deals with development in an organism. A tendency to growth is assumed, and this growth is envisaged in the perspectives of homogeneity and continuity.
But any analysis of institutions as purposive systems of individual ideas, as systems, above all, of individual allegiance, makes plain the reality of conflict and crisis in the history of such institutions as family, community, and property. We cannot understand the dynamic element in institutions by searching for supposedly universal tensions in human relationships, any more than we can understand it by positing at the outset a timeless principle of development in society. Social change is never continuous development. It is not development at all in any tangible sense of that word. Neither is it the simple consequence of the mechanical impact of events upon passive institutions and groups. The latter may come closer to the conditions of change, but what is important is to see that social change is fundamentally the intellectual and emotional reaction of individuals to intrusions or alterations of their environment. Social change appears only when the results of such intrusions are incorporated, however confusedly or reluctantly, in the life organizations of individuals and thus come to exert a demonstrable influence upon the purposive and meaningful nature of their consciousness. The conflict between established habits and environmental compulsions to change can be a drastic one.
Change is always, at bottom, the reaction of individuals to new circumstances and the consequent effort of individuals to comprehend these new circumstances, to make them meaningful, and to build them into new values and new systems of allegiance. It is thus a matter of conflict frequently within a social system—family, or community, or church—and it is, more significantly, a matter of frequent conflict among institutions. For, since each institution is a pattern of functions and meanings in the lives of individuals, and hence demanding of individual loyalties, the change in one institution—the loss or addition of functions and meanings that are vital—must frequently react upon the structure of some other institution and thus awaken conflicting responses in the mind of the individual.15
Of all conflicts in European history, the most fundamental have been those relating to the location of social function and the administration of authority in human lives. From these have arisen the intense, often agonizing, conflicts of allegiance which we see in the spiritual history of a society. It is not necessary to invoke Hegelian or Marxian teleologies to see these conflicts. They are embedded in the empirical materials of institutional history—in the struggle of Church with clan in the early Middle Ages, of Church and State in the later Middle Ages, and in the incessant conflicts of State and guild, State and village community, State and feudal class in still later periods. Such conflicts arise from the very nature of institutions regarded as structures of function, authority, and allegiance.
When Marx, largely under the suggestive influence of the early interpreters of the French Revolution, made class conflict the central fact in historical interpretation, he was not wrong in seizing upon the reality of conflict, and it is not wholly his fault if followers as well as enemies have chosen to interpret this conflict in the picturesque terms of the barricades. Where Marx was grievously in error was in singling out the ill-defined category of class—the institution in capitalist society with the least possible claim to being regarded as a significant structure of personal allegiance and functions—and in investing conflict with a teleological essence that must make it culminate in a new Golden Age of tranquillity. He was wrong in overlooking the far more momentous conflicts in social history between such institutions as kinship, religion, guild, and State. But Marx was profoundly right in stressing the centrality of conflict in institutional change.
In the orthodox rationalist tradition little attention was paid to periods and spheres of crisis in society and to persistent conflicts of values among coterminous institutions. The gospel of homogeneity and adjustment held the field. Attention was fixed on what was believed to be the natural provision of nature for the smooth and orderly change of society as a whole. That a plurality of institutions could exert upon individuals powerful and possibly irreconcilable conflicts of allegiance was seldom considered by the progressive rationalist.
Nevertheless the conflict is there, and it is a fact of the highest significance in history. Sometimes this conflict is passive, awakening only vague sensations of tension. Elements of persistence and conformity in the individual may reduce the effects of the conflict on his allegiances. At other times it may be fierce and overt, reflected in widespread mass upheaval and in the central problems of the major social theorists. Such conflicts, small and large, do not, as the progressive rationalist has thought, resolve them selves inevitably into systems of new coherence and order—either in the individual consciousness or in the overt relationships of the major institutions. Where they are matters of crucial allegiance—as with respect to family, church, and State—they may remain for centuries, now relatively passive, now evocative and fiercely antagonistic.
If we are more commonly struck by these conflicts in some of the dramatic revolutions of modern Europe—1789, 1848, 1917—the fact re mains that they are revealed throughout the course of modern political and social history. Whether in the writings of Luther and Calvin, in the pages of the French Encyclopedia, the economic essays of Hume or Smith, or in the works of Rousseau, Marx, and Mazzini, we cannot miss the implied conflicts of allegiance and authority. They are the very stuff of both intellectual and institutional history.
Five
These observations may be stated more concretely with reference to the institutions of religion and property in modern European history. In both institutions there has occurred a conspicuous decline in the communal conceptions that surrounded them in the medieval world. But behind this decline of religious and economic communalism lie certain momentous conflicts of authority and function, conflicts which become mirrored in the conflicting allegiances and altered statuses of innumerable human beings.
Thus, in the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, we cannot help but see the sharp challenge that was given to the medieval Catholic concept of religion as being essentially an affair of hierarchical organization, sacrament, and liturgy. For an increasing number of human beings, after the sixteenth century, the corporate Church ceases to be the sole avenue of approach to God. In the devotions of Protestants, ritual, symbolism, hierarchy, in short all the appurtenances of the church visible, wane or disappear in religious life. Out of this atomization of religious corporatism emerges the new man of God, intent upon salvation through unassisted faith and unmediated personal effort.
At the back of this decline of religious communalism are certain decisive conflicts of authority and allegiance. These are conflicts, if we like, between the individual and Rome, dramatized by Luther's nailing of the theses to the church door. But, more fundamentally, they are conflicts between Church and sect, between Church and family, between State and Church, and between businessman and canon law. The Reformation becomes a vast arena of conflict of authority among institutions for the loyalty of individuals in such matters as marriage, education, control of economic activity, welfare, and salvation. Basically we are dealing with two momentous conceptions of religion: on the one hand, a conception that vests in the Church alone control of man's spiritual, moral, and economic existence; on the other, a conception that insists upon restricting the sphere of religion to matters of individual faith and transferring to other institutions, notably the State, responsibilities of a secular sort. This is a conflict that goes on even at the present time, and, although the high-water mark of the conflict is to be seen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was apparent as early as the fourteenth century in the activities of Wyclif.
In Wyclif we find an almost modern devotion to the individuality of conscience and faith and a devotion also to a political environment capable of reducing the powers of the religious and economic institutions in society. He was opposed to ecclesiastical courts, to monasteries, to hierarchy within the Church, to all of those aspects of Christianity that hemmed in, as it seemed, the right of individual judgment. Not without cause has Wyclif been called the morning star of the Reformation.
Unfortunately for Wyclif, in the fourteenth century the doctrines of religious corporatism were too strong for his ideas of the primacy of the individual in matters of faith and of the State in all secular matters. But by the sixteenth century conflicts between Rome and many of the principalities and kingdoms of Western Europe had become so sharp that a more favorable environment for religious dissent was constituted. It is doubtful whether any of the major ideas of Luther and Calvin were new. But conditions had reached the point where age-old controversies within the Church could no longer be contained within its authority. New areas of authority, both economic and political, had arisen and become strong, and within some of these it was possible for the ideas of a Luther to achieve the revolutionary significance that had been denied those of Wyclif.
The great aim of such men as Luther and Calvin was the purification of doctrine and belief, but, like many before them, they knew that the advancement of these aims was dependent upon a radical change in the structure of religious authority and in the functional relationship of the Church to other institutions. If religion was to be purified, it had to be divorced from the corrupting influence of its social and economic functions in the life of man. And the religious faith of individuals had to be protected from the noxious effects of external trappings of religion.
For Luther and Calvin the essence of religion lay not in external activities or relationships but in the power of individual faith. “As the soul needs the word alone for life and justification,” wrote Luther, “so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works…. Therefore the first care of every Christian ought to be to lay aside all reliance on works, and to strengthen his faith alone more and more.” For Calvin, too, the primacy of individual faith was indubitable. He writes bitterly of the medieval school-men who “have deprived us of justification by faith, which lies at the root of all Godliness…. They, by the praise of good works transfer to man what they steal from God.”
In Protestantism there has been a persistent belief that to externalize religion is to degrade it. Only in the privacy of the individual soul can religion remain pure. There has been little sympathy for the communal, sacramental, and disciplinary aspects of religion. Protestant condemnation of the monasteries and ecclesiastical courts sprang from a temper of mind that could also look with favor on the separation of marriage from the Church, that could prohibit ecclesiastical celibacy, reduce the number of feast days, and ban relics, scapularies, images, and holy pictures. The guilds were suspect, and even the bonds of wider kinship could often be regarded with disfavor on the ground that they represented a distraction from the direct relation of the individual to God. Works, liturgy, sacrament, and polity might be desirable, but only individual faith was crucial. Three principal elements of Christianity were left in Protestant theology: the lone individual, an omnipotent, distant God, and divine grace. All else was expunged by reformers whose distaste for Roman corruption led by imperceptible degrees to a forswearance of all those institutional and ceremonial aspects regarded as the channels of corruption.
What the literary historian, Edward Dowden, has written of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is illuminating as a description of Protestantism. “All that is best and most characteristic in Bunyan proceeds from that inward drama in which the actors were three—God, Satan, and solitary human soul. If external influences from events or men affected his spirit, they came as nuncios or messengers from God or the Evil One. Institutions, Churches, ordinances, rites, ceremonies, could help him little or not at all. The journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City must be undertaken on a special summons by each man for himself alone; if a companion join him on the way, it lightens the trials of the road; but, of the companions, each one is an individual pilgrim, who has started on a great personal adventure, and who, as he enters the dark river, must undergo his particular experiences of hope or fear.”16
At times, to be sure, as in the Geneva of Calvin, the organizational side of the new religion could be almost as stiff as, and perhaps more tyrannical than, anything in the Roman Church. There is indeed a frequent tendency among historians to overlook the sociological side of early Protestantism, manifested in the solidarity of many of its sects and movements. Yet, from almost the beginning, the spread of Protestantism is to be seen in terms of the revolt against, and the emancipation from, those strongly hierarchical and sacramental aspects of religion which reinforced the idea of religion as community. This is an aspect of religious history which, as we observed earlier, has come to plague the minds of many contemporary Protestant theologians, leading in the present day to a renewed interest in the communal properties of religion. The drive toward individualism and the attack upon corporatism remains the most luminous aspect of the religious revolution that began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
“The difference,” Tawney has written, “between loving men as a result of first loving God and learning to love God through a growing love for men may not at first sight seem profound. To Luther it seemed an abyss, and Luther was right. It was, in a sense, nothing less than the Reformation itself. For, carried, as it was not carried by Luther, to its logical result, the argument made not only good works, but sacraments and the Church itself unnecessary.”17
Six
In the history of modern capitalism we can see essentially the same diminution of communal conceptions of effort and the same tendency toward the release of increasing numbers of individuals from the confinements of guild and village community. As Protestantism sought to reassimilate men in the invisible community of God, capitalism sought to reassimilate them in the impersonal and rational framework of the free market. As in Protestantism, the individual, rather than the group, becomes the central unit. But instead of pure faith, individual profit becomes the mainspring of activity. In both spheres there is a manifest decline of custom and tradition and a general disengagement of purpose from the contexts of community.
It is impossible to miss the similarity between Calvin's man of God, supported only by inner faith and conscience, and the economists’ man of industry—economic man—supported assertedly by innate drives toward self-gain and competitive endeavor. Both of these personages have been truly revolutionary elements in the modern world, and they must be seen as centers of new systems of authority and right. The rise of economic man, like the rise of the Protestant, must be seen in the context of struggles for assertion of initiative, but also in the context of conflicts in systems of authority.
Inevitably in this process of forming new centers of power and right there occurred, as Franz Oppenheimer has described it, “a breach in all those naturally developed relations in which the individual has found protection…. The community bonds were loosened. The individual found himself unprotected, compelled to rely on his own efforts and on his own reason in the seething sea of competition which followed.”18 Philosophically, what is new in capitalism is not the pursuit of gain. This is a timeless pursuit. Rather it is the supposition that society's well-being is best served by allowing the individual the largest possible area of moral and social autonomy. It was this moral and social autonomy that the surviving medieval corporations tended to block; through both force and principle the new middle class sought to exterminate or check at least the traditional communal authorities.
As in the history of Protestantism, the set of beliefs stressing the impersonal nature of justice, the individual root of success, and the abstraction of virtuous incentives from traditional morality has triumphed on the whole in the modern history of property. It has not always been a clear triumph. The actual nature of the contemporary corporation is perhaps as different from early capitalist enterprise and the free market as the latter were from the medieval guild. The individualistic aspects of capitalism, however, have maintained intellectual supremacy in much modern thought. A whole succession of philosophers, beginning with the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, have sought to discover in these aspects the bases of harmony and self-perpetuating progress. Even if the actual horrors of early capitalism seem to be the result less of genuine individualism than of an exploitative, highly disciplined conglomerate of collective associations—the workshops and factories—the fact remains that ownership of property and its “right of use and abuse” was in the hands of the individual entrepreneur. It is this side of capitalism, stemming so largely from the decline of custom and the atomization of traditional communities and associations, that is of greatest interest.
Innumerable historians, beginning with Marx and Engels, have described the impact of the new systems of commerce and manufacture upon social groups and customs that had been central in the medieval system. The Hammonds19 have written memorable passages about the disintegrative effects of the factory on town and village community; they have pointed to the individualizing effects upon traditional morality of separating per sons from the context of family and community, and to the rise of the new system of mechanical discipline, the factory. Behind the new discipline, represented by the factory bell and the overseer, the precise division of the day into units of wages-time, the mechanical modes of machine-driven precision, and the long series of minute regulations, there was “the great, impersonal system,” within which human beings existed for the work day, not as members of society but as individual units of energy and production.
The impersonality of capitalism was rooted in the same exclusion of ritual, ceremony, and community from the new factory that characterized so many of the Protestant declarations of religious purpose. As Ostrogorski has written,20 capitalism was an isolating and separating process that stripped off the historically grown layers of custom and social membership, leaving only leveled masses of individuals. Having aided in the destruction of the older unities, it strove to found a new kind of subordination and a new hierarchy to replace the older forms.
It is capitalism, above all other movements in modern history, that is most generally charged with responsibility for the modern leveling and proletarianization of cultures, for the creation of atomized masses of insecure individuals. Capitalism, it is said, has substituted quantity for quality, process for function, bigness for smallness, impersonality for personality, competitive tensions for the psychological harmonies of cooperation. It has transformed intense communities of purpose into the sprawling relationships of the market place.
Yet with all respect to the influence of capitalism, I do not think it can be called the primary agent in the transmutation of social groups and communities. I do not question the economic context in which many of the specific manifestations of social dislocation and transfer of allegiances took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What I question is the ascription of either logical or historical primacy to the economic facts of the pursuit of wealth and the development of technology and the so-called middle class.
That incentives to wealth and financial gain are operative in virtually every area or sphere of life is beside the point here. It is the structure or context of these incentives that is of crucial importance. The economic determinist has argued that the basic influences in modern history have been those exerted, first, by changes in technology, and, second, by the rise and expansion of a middle class that set to work consciously or unconsciously to redesign the fabric of society in accord with its residual economic interests. From these interests, it is said, have come the tendencies of rationalization, impersonality, mechanism, and leveling which have so powerfully affected the cultural and social nature of modern European society.
It is this proposition that I find untenable. For, with all recognition of the influences of factory, technology, the free market, and the middle class, the operation of each of these has been given force only by a revolutionary system of power and rights that cannot be contained within the philosophy of economic determinism. This system is the political State.