English Society, 1660-1832 : Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime

Rating:
Summary: The "Age of Reason" never happened
Review: In the first edition "English Society, 1660-1832," J.C.D. Clark took aim at the Whig interpretation of England's eighteenth century as dominated by rationalism, Lockean individualism, and emerging capitalism, yet with its politics stubbornly mired in the "Old Corruption" of rotten boroughs and electoral fraud. He challenged this interpretation by documenting how Anglican, how Tory, how deferential, how honor-bound, and monarchical English society remained, up until the great reforms of 1832. The hackneyed contrasts of divine right vs. social contract, reason vs. revelation, commerce vs. aristocracy were foreign to the way most eighteenth century Englishmen in the supposed "Age of Reason" actually thought.

In discussing the relation of monarchy and religion, Clark first argues that the popular support for the Tory cause of restoring the Stuarts remained widespread into the 1760s. Provocative enough, but more importantly, he demonstrates how all but the most radical of Whigs used basically similar divine-right defenses of the Hanoverian monarchy, only adding the possibility that divine Providence might modify the succession at times of crisis. Locke's argument that society be based on the consent of self-interested individuals (social contract theory) had little or no influence.

Clark emphasises that the Church of England was the country's most influential intellectual force at both elite and popular level until the 1820s. Clark shows how the arguments of the Anglican church's apologists for bishops as divinely ordained successors of the apostles gained, not lost, ground in the 1700s. King and bishop both ruled by divine right and did not need consent of Parliament or congregation. Yet mainstream English thought denied that such legitimation made either institution despotic, irrational, or arbitrary.

The opposition to this Anglican state, Clark argues, was motivated not by secular outrage at poverty or electoral corruption, but by religiously based opposition to Anglican hegemony and/or Christian dogma. Opposition took three forms: the dwindling band of Commonwealthmen, hoping to make the Dissenters' congregational church polity a model for republican government, the Irish Catholic constituencies brought into Parliament by the Union of 1803, and most importantly the covert network of anti-Trinitarian dissent: Arians, Socinians, and Deists who denied the divinity of Christ and hence the divine appointment of His church. As demographic changes weakened Anglicanism in the 1820s, Parliament voted out of existence the Anglican confessional state in 1828-1832. Even then, the confessional state might have survived, Clark implies, except for the unprincipled maneuverings of many of its supposed supporters.

In the first edition, Clark included detailed critiques of the existing literature. The new edition eliminates most of the polemical material and adds a lucid discussion of how the Anglican hegemony was rebuilt in 1660-1688. The new edition is clearer, but lacks some of the barracuda bite impact (at least by academic standards) of the first.

"English Society," particularly in the first edition, assumes considerable knowledge of the facts of English history. It is not a book for beginners or for those seeking a smooth narrative history. It is, however, an brilliantly written and powerfully argued riposte to historians that have bent all their talents to making marginal "radicals" into the central figures of history.