Abstract
Lord Acton saw history as the story of liberty. Tocqueville, on the other hand, saw it — though he did not put it that way — as the story of equality. It was the equalisation of conditions which provided the underlying plot of social development. If indeed it does so, the plot is a curious one, as is decumented in an admirably thorough historical survey by Gerhard Lenski.1
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Notes
Power and Privilege (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966).
Louis Dumont has consciously attempted to perpetuate the Tocquevillian tradition and to analyse both egalitarian and inegalitarian societies, and to separate the issues of hierarchy and holism. Cf. his Homo Hierarchicus tr. by Mark Sainsbury, (London: George Weidefeld & Nicholson, 1970) and his Homo Aequalis, translated into English as From Mandeville to Marx (Chicage und London: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Both his account of Indian and of Western societies — treated as paradigms of hierarchical and non-hierarchical organisation — are open to the suspicion that he overstresses the of ideology, and does not sufficiently explore non-ideological factors. Dumont’s insistence on separating the issue of egalitarianism and holism (Indian society being for him the paradigm of a society both hierarchical and holistic) receives a kind of confirmation from Alan Macfarlane’s recent Origins of English Invidualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1878), with its striking and powerfully argued claim that English society was individualistic since at least the later Middles Ages. It would be hard to claim that it was also egalitarian.
It is arguable that this in fact does happen; that the high valuation of a kind of agressive “personality” in middle America is connected with an egalitarianism which denies that a man can bring previous rank to a new encounter. He is expected to establish his standing by his manner, but not allowed to appeal to his previous history and position. If so the cult of restraint which is so characteristic of much English culture (and which Weber considered to be one of the consequences of protestatism) could be attributed to a valuation of rank and status, which frees its carrier from a vulgar need to insist loudly on his standing. He is, he doesn’t need to do. This provides a useful and discouraging hurdle for the would-be climber, who is faced with a fork: if he conducts himself with restraint, he will remain unnoticed and outside, for as yet he is not; but if he makes a noise, he will display his vulgarity and damn himself. (In practice, many have however surmounted this fork). Tocqueville attributed English reserve not to rank as such, but to the fluidity and ambiguity of ranking, which makes it dangerous to establish a connection with a stranger whose standing is as yet necessary obscure. If my argument about the connection between egalitarianism and the multiplicity of organisations is correct, one might expect egalitarianism and non-recognition of rank in daily encounters to be less marked in Socialist industrial countries, given the fact that socialist economic organisation approaches more closely the unification of production in one singly organisation, whose sub-parts employ the same idiom and can have mutually translatable, equivalent rank-systems. This tendency, if it obtains, may perhaps be compensated by the greater overt commitment of socialist societies to egalitarianism. It is also possible that the whole argument is empirically contradicated by the case of Japan, which combines a notoriously successful industrial society with, apparently, great rigidity of and sensitivity to rank, at least within any single one organisation. One would like to know whether ranking is ignored, with a polite egalitarianism, in encounters between men of different organisation. Cf. R. P. Dore, Japanese Factory — British Factory (London: George Allen & Uwin, 1973).
Cf. Pavel Machonin a kollektiv, Československá Společnost (Bratislava, 1969).
Cf. John Westergaard and H. Resler, Class in Capitalist Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977)
or P. Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Les Héritiers (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1964).
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© 1984 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Gellner, E. (1984). The Social Roots of Modern Egalitarianism. In: Andersson, G. (eds) Rationality in Science and Politics. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 79. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6254-5_7
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