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Daniel and David Bell

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from: Daniel Bell

English Class

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 15, 1999, at 3:45 PM ET

Dear David:

Don't get me started on the British. You know that for the past 45 years (until recently) we have spent considerable portions of every other year or so in England. I was a fellow at St. Antony's College in Oxford in 1957, a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics in 1976-77 (the year you went to Westminster), and the Pitt Professor at Cambridge in 1987-88, one of the happiest years of our life. The British can be so deft. In 1976 we had a flat on Regent's Park Road, facing Primrose Hill, and down the street was one of the familiar blue-and-white plaques that said: "From 1873 to 1895, here lived Frederick Engels, Political Philosopher." Not stalwart fighter for the working class. Or enemy of the capitalist class. Just political philosopher.

Yet there has also been an ugly strain of anti-Semitism that has run through British life, associated with the identification of Jews with money. (Aristocrats have land, even penniless, not money.) It is there in Graham Greene's pre-WWII novel Stamboul Train, with its picture of the greasy currant merchant. It is there in T. S. Eliot's poems ("Burbank With a Baedeker: Bleistein With a Cigar"), the subject of a disputed book by Anthony Julius just a year ago. (Mrs. Thatcher, interestingly enough, had at one time four Jews in her cabinet--Keith Joseph, Malcolm Rifkind, etc.--and her intellectual biographer was our late friend Shirley Letwin.)

So many of these contradictions come to a head in The Spectator, the Tory magazine that is full of sparkling writing. Yet a number of years ago, Auberon Waugh (familiarly called Bron, as the British are wont to do with public figures), the son of Evelyn Waugh, had a column in The Spectator in which he remarked: "We are all familiar with being in strange places and not knowing exactly where we are. I woke up one morning and was served a filthy kosher breakfast, and I realized that I was in Tel Aviv." I wrote a note to Alexander Chancellor, who was then the editor (and who now writes "International Papers" for Slate), and asked how Waugh knew that it was a "filthy kosher breakfast," unless it was filth recognizing filth. Not the best of repartee; but one loses wit in anger.

And then there is the unspeakable Taki, who still writes a weekly column for the Spectator, called "High Life," about the party-going and boozing and womanizing in New York, London, and Gstaad. There is often that globule of anti-Semitic spit that he drops into his column. Yet in his writings for American magazines, he is careful to refrain. I remarked on this once at a party in London and was overheard by Noel Malcolm, who said: Do you want him to double his anti-Semitism? Sir, I replied, you are too clever by half. Repartee.

You know that I began a book on England many years ago that I never finished. What prompted it was the realization that while Marx had lived in England for more than 30 years, and that in Capital he told the Germans that England mirrored their fate, his writings on English society are so thin. (Curiously, he never tried to meet Mazzini or Alexander Herzen, fellow exiles, let alone John Stuart Mill or Matthew Arnold. He remained within the closed circle of his German devotees.)

While Marx was preoccupied with economic class, he never understood English society, which has been ruled by social class. England has been a fairly rigid class society--made "visible" by accent--but with relatively open access for talented grammar-school lads, such as Allan Bullock or Asa Briggs, who become Lords and occupy the major positions in English cultural and educational life. Isaiah Berlin first made his mark by conversation.

Status ruled. People bought status by buying land--in three generations, a gentleman--or entering a profession. (In Trollope's Palliser novels, the vade mecum; of English society, a character says: I am not in trade; I have a profession.) Or they renewed the blood, and money, by American heiresses. I don't think that Marx would have liked the novels of Henry James; he loved the blood and gore of Eugene Shue.

And now Tony Blair. Blair has finally achieved what Tony Crosland wrote about 40 years ago--that Labor could not be a class party (after all, the working class was shrinking in a post-industrial world); he has made it a "middle-class" party. Blair is a brilliant, ruthless politician (albeit with an authoritarian streak) but vacuous in his rhetoric and ideas. His house intellectual, Tony Giddens, the director of London School of Economics, has told him (40 years late ) that left and right have no meaning today on the ideological spectrum. So, they have formulated the Third Way. What is it? No one seems to know. My friend W. G. (Lord) Runciman, the businessman and sociologist at Trinity (quite a combination), calls it "recycled platitudes." Les mots justes. Is that not the definition of political life today--in the United States as well as in the U.K.?

Love,
Dad

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Daniel Bell

English Class

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 15, 1999, at 3:45 PM ET
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Daniel Bell is professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard and the author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which was recently re-issued (click hereto buy it). David Bell, Daniel's son, teaches history at Johns Hopkins University, and is the author of the forthcoming The National and the Sacred: Religion and the Origins of Nationalism in France.
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