Class and Ideology

Abstract

The highly developed pre-existing trade and agricultural market relationships enabled England ‘spontaneously’ to become an industrial market society and the smoothness of the transition reinforced a system of beliefs which saw the unfettered or free market as the only route for economic progress and as the sole guardian of social welfare. Whatever the ultimate causes of the vast changes in the West that preceded and made possible the ultimate take-off into industrialisation, there can be little doubt that the fundamental changes in belief systems and in productive systems were related. Science’s attempt to understand the physical universe as a natural phenomenon, at least theoretically amenable to human control, united rational habits of the mind with empirical practice and encouraged experimentation and threatened the intuitive and mystical explanations of traditional belief systems. Technology, at first the apparent product of the inspired hunches of practical men, became part of a systematic interchange betweeh theory and practice and it is this coalescence of science and technology that typifies the common productive measures of advanced industrial societies whatever their political system. The growth of science and technology was accompanied by a decline in the belief in the divine right of kings, or the belief that kings were agents of God, and this led to a new age of political discourse in which authority could no longer be justified in terms of appeals to the ‘sanctity of immemorable tradition’ but had to be rendered legitimate in terms of public utility of an observable nature.